Today, I spent a portion of the day working on getting the inside galley of COLLAPSOLOGIES ready for print--a feat that becomes a little less difficult each time on this self-publication go-round, but each book seems to bring its own set of challenges. While I make less of the mistakes I made with the first book, I find the possibility for new ones--even outside of margin tweaking and spotting typos. This one, the challenge was some longer line poems that needed to be dealt with, as well as just strange formatting choices I made when initially working with the poems.
My main task, of course, which I actually do before I drop the mss. into the appropriately sized galley, is to go through and make any changes I want since I initially sealed the poems in finished form, essentially unsealing them and looking at them with fresh eyes. These poems are a couple of years old at the very least, the first of them (overlook) written during lockdowns in spring/summer 2020 and the last (working girl's grimoire) written in the fall of 2021. They were polished up for submission in some cases, or for zines in others. But then again, perhaps as with all my work, it's never "finished." I found myself still tweaking punctuation this go round. Shortening sentences that seemed okay then, but felt clunky and cumbersome now. I shifted a few line breaks in the stanza-ed poems, and a whole bunch in the long-lined tabloid pieces that were extra difficult to jam into the smaller dimensions of a bound collection. Luckily, I am never that married to my line breaks as a poet who has written most of her life in prose blocks. Some other break will almost always work, sometimes for the better.
Most of my revising even of new work is these sorts of adjustments. Not that things come out perfect in any way, but more that I have never been much for revising. At least the content of the poem. A word here and there, or removing something stupid or unwieldy. More trimming than adding. More like tightening or loosening screws than ripping out the struts. I did manage to get a file ready to submit for a proof copy, so I was far more productive than I set out to be this afternoon., good since I will likely not get back to it til next Friday (it's all press work over the weekend and several freelance deadlines coming up early next week). July, though, is coming at me faster than ever.
