And with that title I’m writing again. Well, writing in the sense of finally compressing my raw material into “finished” poems. I realized I had a lot of poem starts and poem fragments and even almost-complete but unresolved poems, so I’m in the process of pulling apart and putting back together and splicing and dicing and seeing what, if any, through-line exists in all these little monsters.
A few I’ve worked on this week: “Radiograph” – a small poem about Marilyn Monroe’s chest x-ray from 1954. “Geometridae” – another small poem about it raining caterpillars during lunch one day last summer up in Montreal. And “A History of Bicycles” – that’s the one I’m very excited about, that feels like I’ve finally embarked on the second half of “The Book of M” and the more personal poems I plan to place alongside the Marilyn poems. The tingly moment: as I was sifting through my notes I found all these disparate passages referencing bicycles: my childhood bike, falling off a bike in Montreal two summers ago and busting my chin open, Michael’s bike getting stolen, and so forth. So I copied them all into the same file and started compressing and hours later emerged with a little gem. Today I finished a small one – “Arc-en-ciel” – and have about 20-30 files to choose from next.
One thing that strikes me about most of these poems is how short they are, both in line length, and total length. “A History of Bicycles” is the only one that spills over onto a second page, and that’s mostly due to formatting. My goal is to get a good sheaf of them together and see how they hang and then maybe start submitting to journals again. I will make progress on this book in 2012!