Yesterday, I sat down with my manuscript plus the 40 poems that aren't currently in it (mostly new, but some are from my MFA workshops that didn't make the cut for my thesis), and started to do some shuffling. And then I just got frustrated.
When I was ordering my thesis, I had three sub-projects that I was trying to weave together: childhood/family poems, Donny & Stella, and waitressing/working class poems. It all worked well because Stella was "my" cousin and she was a waitress, and I wrote some Donny childhood poems and he was a working class guy...at the time, it all made perfect sense.
But when I look at the manuscript now, there are about 5-10 childhood/family poems that don't fit and I'm anxious about the Stella stuff because of the chapbook--literally half of the full-length manuscript is in Flood Year. I feel like I need to do more with Stella so that folks who read the chapbook have something new to learn about her if/when In the Weeds goes out into the world. But that's a minor concern. I know that lots of poets' first chapbooks land directly in their first books. It's the poems I want to take out--they're going to need to be replaced or the ms is too short (and way too Stella-centric at that point). So, then there's those 40 unaccounted-for poems. Do they (some of them) end up in ITW? Or are they for a new manuscript(s)?
What I ended up with yesterday were three piles--which could turn out to be 3 manuscripts. And it would feel really, really nice to have a sense of the trajectory of my first three books. But I wonder if I'm drawing these lines in the sand that don't need to be drawn. Some of the poems in pile three could easily be integrated into ITW. I could even slap Donny's or Stella's names on some of them and add a few identifying details and *poof*--they're persona poems.
Right now, I wish that I wrote with more purpose. For the last year or so, I've been writing always with my thesis in the back of my mind--I knew when I turned it in that it didn't feel done to me, but everyone who read it at the time told me it was ready--so half of me thought the poems I wrote were for my second project, and half of me thought they were for ITW. I wish I'd been more deciscive, because now I'm just confused.
I've pushed back my personal deadline/goal for getting this manuscript in the mail 100 times (okay, maybe more like 10 times) and I don't know if it is truly for artistic reasons or just because I'm chicken shit. Then again, I knew my chapbook was ready and only had to send it out twice. If I know this manuscript is ready, will I have the same good luck? If I send it out when I'm still unsure, will I be wasting my postage and my reading fees?
And then there's the problem of revision--previously my favorite part of the writing process. But lately, I haven't been able to see beyond the first draft of a poem. What's missing, where is it going, how can I blow out the walls? These questions used to inspire a writing frenzy, now they just cause me to stare out the window listlessly. Eh, I think, this poem's pretty okay as is. I don't really know what else to do with it, so I guess it's done. That's not who I am as a writer! At least, it's not who I want to be. But I've lost my knack for re-visioning. How do I get it back?
