Some Animals

Spent the week preparing my poetry manuscript for submission to publishers. I have to go through this every six months or so - take a hard look at what's there, incorporate new poems, dump other poems that no longer hold water, line-edit individual poems that have "fixable" problems, basically turn the whole thing over and see what's there before sending it out again. This process is both nerve-wracking and rewarding.

This week was complicated by two things:
First, the new title I had settled on this spring ("Kino") was taken by another book of poems (by a long-dead Bulgarian poet) that came out this summer. Damn Google! Nikola Vaptsarov haunts me from the grave. So I had to change course, and that turned out well... I had resisted using a poem as "title poem" in the book, but decided "Some animals" has a nice quality...



Second was a request to send a "brief description" of the manuscript with a query. Yikes. What is this about? What is it about now (as opposed to a year ago, three years ago)? How do I articulate that? One wants to say "See: poems." So I beat my head against my desk for a couple days, sent a draft of what I had written to my trustiest critic, who PANNED it (justifiably), telling me "you're trying to sound like someone else, as if that is what is expected of you, that in order to be considered you have to do an impersonation." Tough love. She was right. So I started over and came up with this:

In Some Animals, distinctions are drawn between song birds and birds we eat. Insects are berated at the gas station. Letters are written foretelling our death. An old woman refuses to die. Horses are born and eat fire. An entire city ignores a woman who immolates herself. The ability to orgasm is found in the bushes. People hide from each other, cover themselves, go naked. An airport seduces a lonely traveler. Gardens go to seed. A woman on a ladder makes bird sounds. A man uses a pulley to fly up to her. Champagne is mistaken for sunshine. A pinpricked toe initiates a deathwatch.

The poems are populated by solitary characters and characters making an effort to connect to each other. The poems are intimate in address, but that intimacy is often in conflict with a loneliness the characters guard fiercely. They may need it later, or it may feel better. There is equal unease at the possibility of all this becoming permanent and the possibility of all this changing. Though the surfaces of the poems are unadorned, the way words fray into other words allows the poems to be unpacked, decoded slowly into their elements. There is a respiration between terse lyricism and poems that shatter and reassemble incongruous images in accumulating simple statements.

This tug between loneliness and intimacy is in some ways a reflection of my biography. I was born in Wyoming and grew up in Appalachia and Southern Indiana, places that were, for me, culturally isolating. I now live in a small city in Germany, where I communicate in a language that until recently I neither spoke nor understood. Instances spring from this isolation—a bird lands on a telephone wire in the back yard and all the traffic noise subsides, time feels impossibly slow until the bird flies away. I go about my day unable to shake what emerged and then was reabsorbed into the environment. A kind of dizziness ensues, and I am forced to concentrate on another object, a fixed point, to keep from tipping over. This continues the cycle.

So that's what it's about, or what happens, or some of the things that happen, but not everything. Better than what I had... still, I think the best description is "see: poems."