Spring Break 2010 (4)

One of those days when you think or know that winter really is over. Walking around Brooklyn, something warm and slightly achy in the air, the streets crowded with people, every people, and the sidewalks so full to get by takes patience and patience and everybody knows and nobody minds and folk are smiling, shyly, as they acknowledge that we, yes, are all just strolling (not striding, not hurrying) but strolling along together.

So revisions this early afternoon and they were good and lazy and then a long walk in Prospect Park with Christian McEwen who is in town for a few days and we criss-crossed and zagged, Cannonball pulled and pulling, and Long Meadow was so full it was hard to know where to walk so it was step here step there. And Christian and I just talked about the usual kinds of things, lives and poetry, selves and friends, the different kinds of nostalgia, the different kinds of hope. We talked about the book she's writing on slowness, a possible new book together on walking (hard to believe we did Alphabet of the Trees a decade ago). And it was fun to return home and sit at the table drinking iced tea after having walked and wonder what a book about walking would look like.

Then Christian left and I sort of worked. Revisions again but this time in early evening. Some reading over student work (the short day left until school starts again). Katherine came home from the studio. Jesse played music, wrote. Black beans and veal with lots of secrets for dinner. Then some writing, revision some more. NCAA Basketball on the tube with the sound off a good deal of the time. Another walk with Cannonball. More writing. Now this. And then to Melville and to bed. Not so bad a day at all.

milestone

A small milestone today: normally I write most of the first drafts of poems in a small moleskin notebook (I always carry one around, something I learned from my friend and collaborator on The Alphabet of the Trees poet Christian McEwen--though I'm not sure she carries a moleskin--it's just the idea of always having a notebook handy). I've found what this has meant is that I write most of my poems someplace else and not in my study. In my study is where I revise, it's almost as though I need (or like) multiple places for beginning and then a central place for working to make the poems better and better.

So there are usually two notebooks that are active at once: the notebook I'm writing in and the notebook I'm writing from. I like to have that distance from the first version to the one I'm going to start revising. Mostly this is to make sure I think the poem is still worth working on. At any rate, as of today, I only have one notebook, the one I'm writing in because in a big push this weekend I finished typing and printing the poems from the notebook I started on 15 February 2007 and finished on 14 June 2007. Which means a nice pile of poems to begin seriously revising over the next weeks. Which is something I'm excited about because revision is something I really like (I'd say love but it's also sometimes so frustrating, but I suppose so is love). I have to say that when I had a residency at VCCA last March (I was on leave last semester) I got a chance to revise with an intensity I'd never had because I arrived with a over one hundred poems. Some I realized pretty quickly I didn't want to work on, but most I did. So for eight, nine, ten hours a day, that was all I did, revise, revise revise (of course I also worked on Poet in New York, sometimes talking with Pablo three or four times a day)., I might have started ten or fifteen new poems the whole time there. It was just working and re-working. What emerged was my Celia Cruz fue la voz tropical manuscript, which I continue to revise even as I'm working on new poems.

So the milestone is the retirement of this notebook, all these new poems to think about. The current moleskin I probably won't finish it for another month, maybe two (this has been a hard working semester) and it's unlikely I'll even begin typing out any poems that are in there until then.

I like when things like this happen, when I feel like I've accomplished something, even as I'm still in the middle of it.