thought I'd share a middle and final draft

[dead_kitty]

A Large Stable of Horses

Comments

[anandimide]

[random comment from the peanut gallery, because I should be doing other, not very pleasant things--]

I like the 1st draft! The 2nd has a really powerful beginning but I think the 1st coheres much better & seems more heartfelt... The 2nd loses me at the Dunkin/Donuts line break.

[dead_kitty]

Hmmm. The first was about many different people/things, and the final was about one person --- I'm not sure how the first could be more coherent. I look into the line breaks.

[anandimide]

I just think the 1st has a lot of emotional energy!--& feels kind of natural somehow, so I didn't feel the need to try & make sense of it, I just enjoyed the mysteriousness. (And I also really like the way the 1st draft ends on "frown"--it leaves me with a sense of unsettled ambiguity--I think because there's no context that tells you for sure whether it's supposed to be a verb or a noun.)

Anyway, you're the poet, not me, so who knows! :)

[anandimide]

Wow. Interesting points.

[surlygrl]

I found a copy of "Children Having Trouble With Meat" at my friend's used bookstore on Friday night and bought it. It's so weird when the internet turns up in real life.

[dead_kitty]

That is weird! I always think I have all the copies of my books, and that no one else sees or buys them!

[alex_gh]

Hello, I've been following your poems a while now. I prefer the second version. The first seems more scattered and free-associative, the second has a more organized flow. Some of the images feel freer and more realized in the first, but only because there's less of a center to that poem. The mind drifts along at first but the end doesn't seem to relate to the beginning, the reader supplies as much as the writer. I like being more directed by my poems.