Friday, November 07, 2008
saturday
Indeed it is the time for Handmade Chicago to go back to The Empty Bottle...we will be there with all sorts of books and paper goodness.
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I am still, however running around like mad most days and things probably won't let up until around Christmas. We are still a bit behind on chaps, so look for a massive slew of titles soon playing catchup. I am also almost done with the second round of dgp submission cuts. If I still have your manuscript, and haven't sent a rejection, you are still in the running I am hoping to have all decisions made and confirmed by the end of next week. I was hoping to do it all in October, but it gets a bit tougher every year to decide.
In other news, a big box of bird museums arrived yesterday, and after I unpacked them, I just sat and drooled over them for awhile. I was paging through it thinking about the poems inside. I think perhaps even more than girl show, which was my actual thesis, this book is actually more in line with the developemental path my poetry took while I was in the MFA program (probably because I was in there FOREVER (4 years part-time) and girl show was actually mostly written in 2006 almost at the end of it all.. There's sort of a line where the poems that wound up in the fever almanac ended (late 2004, about a year in) and the beginnings of what would become this book as my writing style started to shift. And of course, certain sections of it were actually projects for classes, the errata poems, and archer avenue. Much of the other stuff (especially the stuff from feign) was written in 2005, when I got to work with Stephanie Strickland, probably the faculty member (sadly only visiting) who had the best concrete suggestions for improvements I encountered. Some of the later pieces were initially parts of girl show and another manuscript that just seemed to fit better in this one. And then of course there are the andromeda poems, which spanned all four years. The entire book is sort of a collection of what I was doing all those years back in grad school, which is sort of cool snapshot of my own history and obsessions.