Manuscript Madness and "Old" Poetry

I've been fiddling with my ms for the last couple of weeks. Changing line breaks and other small details but nothing big. I have about 3 drafts that I think might fit, but they're not done and my revising isn't going very quickly. I've cut out a few poems that I don't think are right. Shuffled the order a bit.

Something tells me I am subconsciously moving very slowly so I miss the last few contests before summer. Something tells me I should make the changes I marked this morning, print the whole thing, and stick it in an envelope. Be done with it--for now. Because otherwise I will constantly tell myself it isn't quite ready until I get to the point where I hate the whole thing. And then my first book will never get published.

Goal: Print and mail by Thursday. No, Friday. Print by Thursday, mail by Friday. That's the goal.

*

When I started grad school, I knew very little about contemporary poetry. I'd read a bit of Plath, a bit of Bishop, but very little newer. Since then, I've been focusing on the last 60 years or so. Now, I seem to have forgotten everything I read as an undergrad.

I don't remember anything about romanticism. I barely remember Dickinson. My new reading project is to refresh my memory on the "old" stuff. Pre-1950. As far back as I can go. Maybe start with Beowulf again and work my way back up. I want to be ready when I start school again in the fall. I don't want to have to pretend I know what people are talking about--I want to actually know it.

There is a Ph.D. in my future and I still feel like I'm faking it. Does it ever get easier? Do brains expand to hold more information? Because sometimes, I feel like I'm saturated. Like if I learn something new, I'll have to forget something I used to know to make space.

May Day, May Day

You know it is spring in Akron when all you can hear are lawn mowers and leaf blowers. It seems there is a constant buzzing in my head.

I slept until almost 11 today! Good thing I don't have much to do. All my big papers are turned in and I graded everything but my students' portfolios yesterday. I also revised all my poetry of the body poems, so now I have 9 more good ones to send out. And I think my thesis is up to 40 pages. I'm feeling better.

It also looks like I'm going to be moving sooner than I thought, since I'm not nearly as busy this week as I expected to be. It kind of sucks, though, because I made the decision to move in the middle of April, and my landlord doesn't pro-rate rent at all, so I have to pay for all of May here and at the new place. Ugh. This means no road trip.

I'm going to be looking for a job next week, too. I've decided not to do the temp thing again because working all day in an office in the summer is torture. Instead, I'm going to take a trip down memory lane and try to get a serving job (maybe bartending, who knows?). This is how I paid for the first two years of college, so it's old hat, but it's been a long time and I've gotten lazy over the last couple of years. Waiting tables is hard work. But it should help with that new series I'm working on, right? It's research!