Weekends are my breathing room, the period at the end of the sentence. When I rest up, recuperate, rally the troops after running around like a crazy person all week. I do things like sleep til noon and play with collages & irish coin cuff links. Binge watch Bates Motel and organize cardigans or my ballet flats by color (mostly becausee these things make me feel organized while I'm really not). While I usually spend Saturday afternoons assembling books in the studio, I've been trying to use my Sunday afternoons (somewhere between my usual cleaning routine and brunch and sometime before my weekly phone call with my mother) as writing time, or at least some extended period of getting things on paper. As I've gotten older, I've found that while I can get more bang for less invested time writing, I tire out more easily and have to refill the well. Sunday afternoons are for getting things down in whatever rough form and the spending a little time during the week doing some polishing.
As I'm working through the bulk of the apocalypse poems and hoping to get a full manuscript from it by the end of March, I keep thinking how, while it sometimes feels like I'm writing the same things over and over again, the same obsessions, the same concerns, each book is different mostly in it's tone. Every once in a while, I pull out the fever almanac, and it feels overly frilly, overly baroque (and perhaps I am stealing the exact same phrase one of my MFA instructors charged me with.) There are poems I love in there ("sangria" and "predictions" still rock my socks off, maybe "night drive".) Many of the rest feel a little overwrought and way too "poetic" whatever that means, and yet people really love these poems, and sometimes, the most passionate of my readers favor those poems in that very first book far more than anything else I've written since. But I suppose this is true of all artists and their relationship to their work, that we best can see the cracks in the wall that no one else seems to notice. I am excited about major characters and it's release mostly because parts of it are a million miles away from that. The two newest manuscripts even more so. But I suppose that everyone loves their newest darlings best.
The rest of day has been attending to logistical things--travel arrangements for AWP, some laundry, dinner.
Maybe some thoughts on a release shindig for the new book. I've been dreaming of long train trips and strange rom-com taxi scenes. The weather is milder and my sniffly cold from last week seems to be on the way out...so lets hope this week starts off with a bang...
