Last night's reading at DvA, the first anniversary extravaganza (with cake), went over well. My ass is a little sore from sitting on the floor of the gallery for so long--lots of poems about New Orleans it seemed, and lots of politically charged pieces. What was cool was that it featured a huge cross-section of Chicago poetry world, from academics to more performance-oriented stuff. And while yes, there were a couple of duds in the mix (mostly involving bland bad rhyming stuff), it was still enjoyable. I decided to read some of the dulcet poems, which I haven't really put out there yet--they're a bit raw and unpolished yet. I'm finding the prose poems have a different sort of rhythm when read aloud.
A couple more days and I'm back in class. I've been looking over some older work today and came to the realization that my first semester in the program I was writing mostly unsalvageable crap. There's so much that I'm not even up to trying to fix written that fall. By spring it evened out--the poems also got shorter. By the next fall, good poems outweighed the bad. I don't know if it was just a transitional thing or I was suffering growing pains or what. There are quite a few pieces written between 2001 and 2003, before coming back to school, that I decided to include in the book manuscript, but only one or two, and those heavily revised, from fall 03. Most of it is bloody awful.
Maybe this MFA thing works after all.
