Manuscript Madness

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?

3-in-1

Well, I took Kelli and Oliver's advice (thanks guys!) and lowered my standards. Here are my 3 mini drafts from yesterday. I'm still a bit behind, though. Maybe I'll get 3 more today (ha!).

Oh, and I guess I should say that these are all dealing with personae from my thesis. I'm trying to figure out if the ms is really done or if I have more to say. I'm still not sure.

15a: Donny Takes a Night Class

poof


15b: Stella on the Playground

poof


15c: Lessons from a Grill Cook

poof

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I've been trying to write a poem titled "Lessons from a Grill Cook" for years. I think I still haven't.

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?