The Fate of Orphaned Poems.

Okay, I’m running with the hybrid manuscript idea. It’s all put together and proofread – and it reads smoother than either book did separately. I’ve sent out The Blues Handbook (that’s the title I settled on) to a contest. I’ll send it to two or three more in April, depending on money. Book contest submission fees are getting pricey. But that’s another rant for another day.

Where does that leave the orphaned poems, the ones that up until awhile ago were strong enough to be in a book but are now are just floating in limbo (and not the good kind of limbo, with a pole and reggae music)? Some of these have been published or won awards, so I can’t ignore their existence.

I identified three categories of these leftovers, and I have a fair amount of each group: approximately twelve toxic love/relationship poems, ten or eleven “what the hell’s wrong with humanity”/social commentary poems, and eighteen or so surreal poems. I’ll take those groupings, try to pen a few more poems that mesh with the categories, and get three chapbook manuscripts ready to submit by mid-summer.

This will work well with my writing schedule. I planned on writing poetry through April and May, and then focus on short fiction for the remainder of the year. On non-creative days or days when I don’t feel like laboring over prose, I’ll edit and refine the chapbooks.

But any idiot can come up with a plan. Now I have to execute.

I just can’t leave things be.

I've been (obsessively) tinkering with my two poetry manuscripts.

I had an idea to combine them. At first this seemed impossible. I had 60+ pages of urban, soulful, narrative poems, and 50+ pages of surreal and disjointed abstract poems. But I've been playing around with the pieces and it might work. The themes wander along similar lines, as does the imagery. Also, I trimmed cellulite from some poems, and divorced myself from others - not sure what I ever saw in them, anyway.

My recent poems are cleaner, shorter, and less elaborate than my early work. I'm tempted to revise the older poems. But I can't bring myself to change them into something more like what I'm writing now. It feels like someone else created them, and they're perfectly fine in their own way, and I just can't make them anything more than what they are. And I'd be ecstatic to have them published in a book, but I'm growing farther and farther away from them.

When I looked at the recent poems in light of the others, they fit together reasonably well. They bounce against each other, causing an interesting amount of friction. The surreal ones seemingly tug the other ones in that direction more so than standing alone.

I need to come up with a title. Maybe a hybrid of the two manuscripts’ names...perhaps the The Blues Handbook or My Own Brand of Truth or something entirely different?

It would make me slightly less anxious to know there's only one manuscript out there and not two of them that may never get published. Of course on the slim chance either gets accepted on their own in the meantime, all this babbling is all null and void.

Brief Update

I have two poems in the Spring 2009 issue of MO: Writings from the River.  The poems are titled Where We Find Truth and Runaway.  This is the last year this journal will be published under this title; it will undergo a fashionable name change to The Front Range Review.  I'm sure it will continue to be a quality publication dedicated to publishing an interesting mix of established and emerging writers.

I also just received word that my poem Expecting will be published in the Spring 2009 edition of Oracle, the literary magazine of Brewton-Parker College in Mt. Vernon, Georgia.  I am happy to have the chance to contribute - a big thank you to editor Rachel Allen.

Hopefully this is the sign of things to come.  You know, publications and acceptances and stuff like that.

So lately I’ve been doing almost everything but writing.

But that's about to change.  Work (day job) has been hella busy, and so has daily life, but I am about to get back to manufacturing prose and poetry.  I'm four or five poems away from a first draft of the truth handbook, and have several short stories that are in various states of existence.  I have a little down time this weekend, so I'm about to get back into my creative zone. 

Happy Corporate Sponsored Manufactured Romance to Force Millions to Buy Cheesy Greeting Cards and Candy for the Purpose of Sparking Our Ailing Economy Day!

Just kidding.  Or am I?  Happy Valentines Day either way.  :)

It’s not you. It’s me. Really, I mean it.

Nothing personal. I just fell off the grid a little bit. Day job and real life got a little too hectic for me to blog and write as much as I would have liked. This weekend is about catching up. Writing, this blog, reading, emails, whatever. It’s time to get it in.

Redefine the Dream.