What are you working on?
I am currently working on fourth and fifth poetry manuscripts simply by putting poems into two sliding and approximate piles. There could be a sixth book between those two piles that I’m too dumb to see. I’m really not good at the “get your book in order” analytical work. My heart hurts when I see workshops and the like offered on “How to order your manuscript.” There is so much commerce around poetry right now, so much junk, I am deeply suspicious—really, I’m a big drag about it. For God’s sake, just write your poems! I think Dana Levin Tweeted something the other day like, “Can’t I just call my book, ‘What I Wrote from 2014 Until Today?’” A poem comes when it comes, you can’t make the writing of poems directed and expect good poems; you can not set out to make a product. It’s all gotten very A+ student out there and A+ students are incredibly tedious and predictable, even those claiming experimentation. I like some human smell left in a poem—problems, oddities, wildness, even a typo at this point is welcome. At fifty-three, I am really only now starting to write well. Or maybe I’m deluded. I don’t know, life is a dream.
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