I think I may be seriously stretching it in my poem a day thing...I'm not sure WHAT that is below, but I've determined to just write it, get it done, without editing anything, not changing much beyond what first hits the page, and then revising what I have after the month is over. It feels like alot of these are just seeds for poems that need to be developed further. I started out pretty strong last week, but that's because I hadn't written anything new in about two weeks and had alot of juice stored up. Now, I'm struggling a bit more and the poems are getting shorter and more garbled and nonsensical. But hopefully I'll still have something I can work with. It doesn't help that I've been monstrously pulled in alot of directions lately and find myself writing last thing before I go to bed. My typical productivity rate for producing good poems is about one a week.
I've been looking over some stuff from the last year--mostly the science inspired poems from last spring and the errata poems that not quite as dependent on the chapbook project and borrowed texts. Them, and what's in the feign chapbook, just might make a suitable manuscript for my thesis, perhaps incorporating that old title I was going to use for a chapbook instabilities. There's still the women and knowledge thread, but also a women and madness thing going on, women and corruption, women and science, that might work well as a whole. I might be putting too much pressure on the fledgling girl show series to make itself into a book, when it's still so tiny and new. And dulcet is way too disorganized and without aim at this point. The other is much more solid and alot of the poems have been published individually, so hopefully they don't suck. I think I always thought of feign as evolving from errata anyway--even if there wasn't anything really Victorian about them, they still were part of the same overall project, as were the science poems to a degree, though they're less , I guess, political than the others. Political in a feminist sense not a govermental sense. It's weird, but while the first book, aside from stylistic variations of the two, the feels very personal, the new stuff seems to have more of an agenda--all of it, even girl show. Especially that one.
Speaking of books, I took a nap tonight after I got home from work (it was one of those days--Sundays always being a clusterfuck of some sort)and dreamed two very high profile reviews competely slammed me, called my writing precious and fluffy without any substance. One was a newspaper review and the other a magazine listing of Best and Worst poets of 2006. And what was worse, everyone I knew was trying to keep me from seeing them, ripping out the newspaper pages, and hiding things knowing I'd be upset, so then I had to pretend they didn't bother me when they really did. Not to mention one of them was incredibly cruel regarding the sound of my reading voice, my hairstyle, etc. which all seemed to bother me more than the poetry. I should never eat McDonalds before napping again. Ever.
