Answers for Eduardo

Eduardo posed some questions to me in my comments quite a while ago, which I’ve been meaning to answer and will answer now. I don’t know how interesting this will be to anyone else, but it must be better than posting my results for one more “You are…” web questionnaire thingy. So:

EDUARDO: Can you blog about the writing and completion of your second mss.? How are the poems in the second mss. different from the poems in the first book? When did you realize you were writing the poems that would make up your second book?

ME: Well, I put together my first manuscript, Subject to Change, in the fall of 2001. As I was sending STC out to contests all through '02, I kept writing new poems and rearranging the mss. In fact, in the spring of '03, when I got the call from Herb Scott, saying that Brenda Hillman had picked my mss. and six others for the New Issues Poetry Prize, I had slotted in six or eight newer poems since sending it to them. I had pretty well rejiggered the whole thing. But Herb -- wisely, I think -- said he wanted to publish the manuscript in the form that B.H. had selected. And so I thought, OK, here's the first six or eight poems of a second manuscript.

So it was at that point that I started thinking of these newer poems in terms of a new project -- rather than as possible adds to STC. This is all a long way of saying that for me the poems in the two manuscripts don't really have a clear break between them. It’s mostly a matter of timing, though there is a three-part prose poem in LL that actually pre-dates much of STC (technically; but I kept revising it all these years). And partly, I suppose, it’s because they're not really book-length projects, or poem sequences, or even specifically thematic (beyond the usual thematic preoccupations each of us has throughout our writing). So in both cases there wasn’t really a sense of it being finished, except to see that I had 30-odd poems that seemed to stand up together pretty well.

On the other hand, STC ended up being fairly formal (the 33 poems include eight sonnets, an odd-form rhymed poem, and a sestina), while the new one, Like Luck, also 33 poems, is basically "free," aside from two loose ghazals. Both contain several prose poems. Like Luck tends towards longer poems, with quite a few 2-3 pagers in the mix. It also includes more poems that respond to, or relate to, or take off from other art works (a Matisse painting, a Chinese scroll, Li Po's "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter") -- though that's a tendency that was already starting to show in STC. Maybe the biggest difference is one of process: In writing the LL poems, I focused much more on improvisation as a way of starting many of them (with much revision following that initial improv.).

Eduardo, when you return, I want to hear about how you put together your manuscript....