Today I’m working with a little more drang than sturm, but I shall soldier on nevertheless.
I’ve been plugging away at the collection with appalling single-mindedness, and I’m happy to say that I’m making satisfying progress. I can see the connections that will bind individual poems to the premise of the text more clearly, and each revision I’ve made more fully evokes the aggregate identity of the assemblage I want to put forth. It is, at bottom, a fine time to be a latchkey bald man.
Along the way I’ve made two useful discoveries about the way I think and write. Since that’s what these P&P posts are ostensibly all about, I might as well share. This blog, as you know, is all about sharing.
The first perhaps does not qualify as a discovery so much as an experiential proof of the anxiety of influence. About two weeks ago I was really roaring, looking back at some old half-cooked drafts and seeing them in exciting new ways. By subjecting the texts to 45-179° turns, or by fusing sentiments that formerly seemed discrete, I was able to make some compelling renovations. At the time I was reading a few of Jeanette Winterson’s novels and Robert Wrigley’s In the Bank of Beautiful Sins, both of which perfectly aligned with my ambitions. Winterson and Wrigley have a knack for wrinkling images and making indirect connections, coaxing out layers and levels of resonance beyond the obvious and not-so-obvious implications, and that aptitude was exactly what I needed to adapt my own poetry–I needed to interrogate some images more fully, to show them to the reader in idiosyncratically revealing ways. This past week, however, I picked up a decidedly different collection, Victoria Brockmeier’s My Maiden Cowboy Names. Her verse has much to recommend it, and it features a chewy, satisfying density of the kind one likes to roll around the skull for a spell. That density, however, represents something of a hurdle for my own verse: my mind is habitually inclined to a comparable mode of accretive association, but when I yield to that impulse overmuch my work becomes unreadable. I mean that in a very literal way: Brockmeier creates some really lovely, provocative juxtapositions, but in my hands that density yields linguistic logjams more often than anything else. I generally have to find a middle ground, a compromise between my own additive habits of thought and my sense of actual articulation, and reading My Maiden Cowboy Names prompted me to favor the former over the latter. Once I set Brockmeier’s collection aside I was able to recapture much of my former momentum. I look forward to returning to her book at summer’s end, but to my thinking right now it embodies a penchant for density I ought not indulge.
The other discovery pertains to progress proper, the kind of work I have to do in order to finalize the collection by identifying some inherent sense of coherence. That process will involve reconciling two very different compositional impulses.
When those new connections and renovations I mention above were occurring to me readily, I did a better than average job of staying out of their way. I initially felt that some phrasings were unwieldy and some images imperfect, but I persuaded myself to trust the impulse that prompted me to commit them to pixels in the first place. A few revisions later, after a little tempering and sharpening, the verse I produced still seemed energetic and robust; the ideas I jotted down were spot-on, and leisurely retrospection allowed me to refine those rugged originals.
This past week, in contrast, novel combinations did not come to me so easily, and I thought it might be time to turn to other projects while I gave some new ideas time to ripen. I had reverted to my usual workmanlike process, hammering out conceits syllable by syllable, and I was reluctant to trudge along after experiencing the heady rush of revisiting verse I only needed to see a bit differently. Methodologically speaking, however, I thought I could play upon that tension: many poems in the collection are products of that sure-footed, deliberate process of cold forging, and it seemed foolish to concede wholly to a new set of imperatives. What sealed the deal was a side-by-side comparison of products from each approach: I found a really satisfying interplay emerging among them. The renovated verse seems to me a bit more sprung and kinetic, while the more deliberate, calculated productions seem coiled and (for that reason) pleasantly threatening. In the process of envisioning the progress of the entire sequence I’ve threaded together several experimental strings, and each one (as a combination of products from different compositional moments) has fired effectively, with a bit of tension and energy carrying me from one poem to the next. That bodes well for the integrity of the overall experience.
I think that high-tension wiring, rather than connections suggested by theme or thought, will ultimately determine the order of the whole. That’s a fine thing to figure out in the home stretch.
