Reclamation projects

This week, in addition to moving ahead with some new writing, submitting finished poems to magazines, and putting my notebook project to bed, I decided to gather all the poems that I have cut from my manuscript over the last couple years. I figured I would pull this little batch of near-poems together, take another look at them, see if there were poems (or parts) that I could improve/salvage/finally euthanize. Good thing to do with the time over Christmas. My thinking was that maybe after coming close a couple times this year, there might be something already lying around that, with some tinkering, could help put my manuscript over the top in 2010.



I didn't realize there were going to be an additional 80 pages of work... it's like the book behind the book.

Yesterday I pulled out the red pen and dug in, not trying to fix things yet, more seeing whether, with a bit of distance from them, I could more easily identify the problems/shortcomings of the poems.



Sometimes the problem is getting into (or out of) the poems. Beginnings and endings.



Sometimes a poem doesn't know what it wants to be, or how it wants to be.



Sometimes I don't know what to do, or even what's there... I just know something's wonky.



Some poems have hokey conceits, or deep-seated problems that aren't really fixable. At times you have to cut your losses. The only option left is to sell it for scrap. Hopefully the scraps will help another poem that hasn't been realized yet.

Though I'm only about a third of the way through the stack, I'm happy to note that there have also been a few poems which I think are finished, and solid. They may not make their way back into what I'm assembling as a manuscript now, but they might be the start of the next thing...