poems and projects

Today is a long, slow Saturday in the library, in which I hope to get the last of the layouts done for the chaps that need to get done this month. I was also thinking on the bus ride down this morning about poems and writing style. I have never really been one of those poets who thinks of a thing and then just writes a singular, stand-alone poem about it and moves onto the next subject. Or maybe I was 10 years ago, when I was writing the early pieces for the fever almanac, but ever since then, there has always been a project or manuscript or series that I've been writing toward. Part of it is probably the work-horse Taurus in me..I'm highly motivated if I can see an end goal, but not so much otherwise. Otherwise I flounder around and write nothing , or write something, get frustrated and toss it out (or more likely harvest it's parts for something I AM motivated to finish.) I'm alot like this with visual work too, and there, it has always been about series of pieces, so the writing habit may have aligned itself in a similar way around the same time.

I did occasionally eek out lone poems for class exercizes during my MFA, but who knows what happened to them in the mayhem along the way. Truthfully, if you told me to write a singular poems now, I'm not sure where I would even start or what I would write about. I tend to work from my loves and obsessions, so I have a few little fledgling projects going at one time, but no matter what single poem it begins with, there is always a greater sweep of poems plotted beyond that. I especially feel that any given subject matter requires a number of points of entry to get to the heart of it. It needs to be prodded with a fork and forced to give a little over and over. I would probably never have the audacity to write something about something, say my peace, and be done with it. There needs to be multiple plans of attack, things that circle and layer and possibly even contradict each other. All that good stuff.