the odd, rare moment of clarity

In taking a good look at the second manuscript, I’ve determined how, besides obvious surface differences in formal things and line lengths and stuff, the primary difference between them is the voice. Now obviously, all the poems have a certain voice that makes it easy to tell their mine most likely, or so people have told me, but really it’s more the speakers I’m thinking. the fever almanac is all about the gaps between language, the body, and experience/memory. The new poems are still about the body and language in relation to knowledge, but with no sense of memory at all. The speakers in these poems don’t seem to have them There’s a lot of history behind them, but the speakers exist and speak almost entirely in the present. They do not have pasts. They’re very scary little girls. I’m not sure if that makes them more interesting or less so. It certainly makes them more po-mo (and no doubt my tendency toward reading and studying more innovative work the last few years is part of this.) I can’t yet make any pronouncements on the third collection just yet, it seems a mix of voices and speakers, some more clearly defined than others.