grumble, grumble ...
i spent my saturday morning doing the literary equivalent of shoveling shit. i'm assembling this poetry manuscript for Chattanooga, and i've got room in this thing for maybe 40 poems are so. and i've got about 200 poems spanning the last 19 years to choose from - a good number of which i hadn't read in a while. so, i spent my morning rereading it all - which meant, on many occasions, trying to figure out just what on earth i was thinking when i wrote this crap. i have no idea what i was doing. i think i was high. after that much obtuse language, purple prose, sloppy enjambments, and imagery as crisp and wilted lettuce, i felt numb.
back at it today and attempting to arrange the 62 pages worth of stuff i picked out. arranging manuscripts sucks. you try to come up with themes and concepts you want to present the reader - it's not some haphazard, random arrangement. well, i'm going through this and thinking "what the hell am i trying to say here?" and not really finding a good answer.
sigh.
usually, the best thing to do when it comes time to arrange and order a manuscript is to just give it to someone else who is familiar with your work and let them do it. other people often see patterns and themes emerge that you never thought of. but the woman who was the best at this for me, and who used to do this for me, well, she kinda dumped me. no one else to turn to at the moment.
at some point here i'll just print all of it out, throw the pages on the floor and play pickup sticks with it, if nothing else but to revel in the mess that i'm making.
back at it today and attempting to arrange the 62 pages worth of stuff i picked out. arranging manuscripts sucks. you try to come up with themes and concepts you want to present the reader - it's not some haphazard, random arrangement. well, i'm going through this and thinking "what the hell am i trying to say here?" and not really finding a good answer.
sigh.
usually, the best thing to do when it comes time to arrange and order a manuscript is to just give it to someone else who is familiar with your work and let them do it. other people often see patterns and themes emerge that you never thought of. but the woman who was the best at this for me, and who used to do this for me, well, she kinda dumped me. no one else to turn to at the moment.
at some point here i'll just print all of it out, throw the pages on the floor and play pickup sticks with it, if nothing else but to revel in the mess that i'm making.