ALL IS QUIET ON NEW YEAR'S DAY...You know that old saying about what you're doing at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve will influence the rest of that year? Well, if that's the case, I'll be with a bunch of drunken lesbians playing Guitar Hero on PlayStation 2.The last couple of days have been quiet, yet very busy...I'll get into that in a minute. Last night, I went to the special New Year's Eve Java Monkey Speaks, and I'm very glad I did. It was like when I first started going with many of the regulars on hand. Since there was no feature, we did a round-robin and everyone who signed up got to read two poems. It was rainy and unseasonably warm, so pretty comfortable on the patio.
After the reading, I was going to meet up with Mal, but she was delayed at a dinner party, so I wound up over at Tina's house where Guitar Hero was in full swing. I'd never played, but I tried it a few times (my best was I Wanna Be Sedated...go figure). The drunken lesbians were fun, so it was a nice evening. I also got to test drive an iPod nano and now I simply must have one.
Okay, so the part about being busy: for the last three days I've been deep into the sequencing process of the new poetry collection. The previously posted idea of having the collection hinge on cinema fell by the way side pretty quickly. Ah, well... The collection started at about 79 pages (way too big) and after a marathon session of shuffling and reshuffling, was whittled down to 57 (just right). I was sitting on the floor in my office space with poems spread out across the floor, moving stacks, grouping thematic work, dividing into sections. Any poet who's put a book together knows what a challenge this is and how frustrating it can be.
The coming weeks will mean additional shuffling and revision on some of the poems. I'd say nearly 70 percent of the collection is new work, and I had to be open minded about jettisoning previously published to make this book hang together. And yes, the book now has a title, but I'm not ready to reveal it yet. I will say it's one word with many meanings.
Keep this in mind, too...
3,000 American troops dead in Iraq for no good reason; anywhere from 25,000 to more than 50,000 Iraqi civilians dead since the start of the "war."
Comments
Awesome news on the new collection. How exciting. Can't wait to read it.