170 to 99

Manuscript pages reduced by that many in two winnowings. Poetry writing is so different than the process of book creation where critical judgment dominates the impulsive moods of the madwoman. In the writing of a poem, I experience complete and almost aggressive freedom. I can go anywhere with my imagination, I can juxtapose any image, I can even make up words.

The crafting/editorial process is putting the reins on the horse and making choices about which trail the poem will take. Then, the final part. Selecting those that make the cut into a "product," a book. I am far less experienced here, and less enamoured of the aspect that has to do with rejection. But, I admire the well-done poetry book: The Blue Iris by Louise Gluck, The Angel of History by Carolyn Forche, Blue Estuaries by Louise Bogan, The Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell, Ariel by Sylvia Plath,the books of Raymond Carver.

This is a process I must learn to love, I suppose, if I want to leave my poems in some viable form. A book is a container and the best books are containers with integrity, they hold together well, everything has its place. In such a way, a book is like a poem: holding just the right words in just the right order. Be brave, lassie, be brave!

The Show Offs

I have given myself the month of July to complete my poetry manuscript, "Workers' Compensation," which mostly means I need to delete about 70 poems that do not hold up as well as the rest. I am attached to all my children, loving the ones who are not as successful as much as I love the ones who come out so bright, shiny and clear that I almost can not believe myself their creator.

Is this how a parent feels? Especially when the reality of a child's life is not as exceptional as the imagination had for so long held it to be? I think about this in regards to my own life and whether or not I have been a disappointment to my own mother (my father has been gone for so long and was, himself, a shadow of what he could have been that the question of my disappointing him is really quite moot). My mother, a businesswoman who broke her own small glass-ceiling in a mail-dominated profession, must be mystified by the direction of my own life: I am more and more embracing myself as an artist, a poet, and doing so much unpaid labor on behalf of my art. The fact that I do not pursue commercial or material success must baffle some. My life instead has almost always been on a spiritual, emotional, thereapeutic track.

My poems are my wee ones. Some are well-formed and near perfect. So many are flawed and requiring further editing, but I care for them all and remember the moment in which each of them arrived on my page, whether in a workshop setting or sitting alone on a mountainside.

To complete the book, then, is a challenge, because I have to leave so many of these children out of the manuscript. Perhaps they will never be worthy of publication, and I must accept that each is what it is: an expression, a sallying forth that never quite made its destination. Others will be my show-offs, the ones who stand by the side of the pool about to dive into the clear blue as they shout "look at me look at me." And those children, as acrobatic and ready as they are do not make me love them any more. So there is a little sorry in giving them pride of place, but do it I must because I cannot expect others to love them nearly as well.