snake charm, fire dance, sword swallow
This week I turned my audio recording project toward GIRL SHOW, which has actually recently gone out-of-print with the press that published it. I still have a good sized stash of copies floating around in the shop. however, though when those are gone, I may issue a second, self-published version. Sometimes I think about how there were a long seven years from the time I finished the mss. at the end of my MFA until it actually came out in 2014. Three of those years were spent under contract at Ghost Road before it went out of business, another year in submission, before finally it was picked up by Black Lawrence in late 2011.
It was my first full project book--not individual poems pulled into a book (like THE FEVER ALMANAC) or several smaller things corraled together. (like IN THE BIRD MUSEUM.) While it was technically the fourth book I released, its completion preceded book #3,THE SHARED PROPERTIES OF WATER AND STARS, by several years, that little book having been completed, solicited, and released in a brisk couple of years in 2013. I still consider GS my third bookish child however, since the poems mark a very particular moment in my style that would change again in the years after my MFA (well, when I was writing at all those years.)
I've been working on some visual carnivalesque things (see here and here) the past few weeks that run a strong parallel, one of which may result in some textural pieces down the line. I've spoken often of the flip-flopping tendencies of visual things to follow written ones, or vice versa. Some hitting that sweet spot and happening all at once, though this is rare for me. In GIRL SHOW's case, there were a small number of collages I made in 2005 that preceded the first poem, the title one, but those were kind of sloppy in both technique and conception. I had only been making paper things for around a year at that point and was just dipping in my toes. The collage on the cover, however, was from a much later set of experiments with paper cuts.
I would finish the book manuscript mid-2006, just in time to begin organizing the unrulyness of it into sections in my thesis seminar. While my classmates were helpful, I was less inspired the following spring working on the fine tuning with my thesis advisor, who made a lot of suggestions I changed to get final approval but then submitted (and had accepted) the original early 2007 version. (It was just easier to agree and turn in an alternate, lesser, version at that point. I was coming off my year of mono-related sicknesses, wrapped in ridiculous romantic drama, and just needed to be done. ) It does kind of irk me that I didn't stand my ground, especially since that version exists in CC's archives in all its tamed down mediocrity.
But the version that was accepted by a press (not once, but twice) and eventually published was my intended one. They are still some of my favorite poems, which is saying a lot having written over 30 years of them. Sometimes it feels like a bridge between styles of writing I felt I was trying on like dresses in those years. It was written pretty fast, the first poem in earlier 2005 and the very last in late 2006.
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