All Poetry, All the Time

*Warning - Excessive caffeine and lack of sleep induced rambling below*

I am planning to finish my thesis tomorrow (i.e., today, for people who don't read my blog in the middle of the night). Well, maybe finish is too strong of a word. But I have to get the ms to my committee by Friday, and the rest of the week is looking awfully busy, so Tuesday is crunch day.

I just spent the last two hours hashing out the annoying pronoun problem I've got going on. The problem began when I invented Stella, the cousin of the speaker. The speaker is, of course, me-but-not-me. Little miss Stella wants to have her own voice, but she happens to have many similarities to her cousin, hence, many of my first person poems are confusing. To make matters worse, I've been all willy-nilly with the 2nd and 3rd person pronouns too. There are at least six different yous and a few hes and shes.

So, here's how I've straightened things out: unless there is some sort of identification in the title of the poem, all I's refer to me (or should I say the me-but-not-me speaker). If there is a she and a bird in the same poem, then the she is my sister Carla (one poem doesn't fit this rule, but I just couldn't get a bird in there). All yous refer to the same unnamed (ex)boyfriend of the speaker (unless the you is identified in the title or the you is a generic you-the-reader).

Okay, unless you're Mary, Jen, Jay, or someone else who's read most/all of my poems, that's not going to make sense. So...I guess you'll just have to wait until I win a first book contest to understand. (haha, don't you love my psuedo-cockiness?)

Now that I know who's who (because I really wasn't sure before) I am hoping to crank out those last few fill-in-the-narrative-gap kind of poems. I think there are between 4 and 8 floating around in my head, plus two that I wrote about a year ago but was too close to revise. It may be overly ambitious to think I can do all that in the next 24 hours (I do plan on sleeping), but I like lofty goals.

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Varley, the new fiction/non-fiction prof at KSU, told me today that if I hadn't told her I was a poet, she would have thought I was primarily a prose writer. Eric Wasserman, the visiting fiction writer at Akron, is trying to re-convert me. Mary, you're going to have to help me fend them off.

Actually, I still think someday my psuedonymous (is that a word? did I spell it right?) romance novels will make me rich. And I wouldn't mind writing a memoir. But maybe I should stick with one project at a time.

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Decisions, decisions. Another can of mountain dew or try to get some sleep?