I worked on work. I watered my plants. I worked on A2O. I attended a confusing yet pleasant party/blogcast. I learned that my tinysides are not only moneymakers ($300!), they are beautiful objects that serve the purposes of poetry at large.
Also, for those who need to know, these are my robot shoes and my evil witch socks.
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UPDATE: just googled one of the words I was afraid I made up. Nope. It is a real word! Used by others! So I am not profligately tossing around illegitimate words. Rather, I am so cutting edge I use words known only to an initiated few. Seriously, we have an initiation. With like capes and stuff.
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I love the word "just."
Raymond Scott is the music everyone hears right before they go crazy.
I like it when people draw hearts on my poems.
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This one's not so bad, either, though. No 'BAD POET, BAD POET' scrawled in blood and fuchsia lipstick, the stuff bad dreams are made of. Good comments, gentle comments, excited happy comments.
Santo still hasn't fallen off the wall. He may stick around yet. Trying to write new poems as well as revise the old ones. I'm not pushing it though. Just happy to get a few lines down about whatever the hell. Sort of the "twenty lines a day" approach. A few lines directed at nothing, and then some lines added to a project currently going by "House of Noir" which is just an Elmore Leonard novel in poetry form. I will probably be writing about Florida for the rest of my life, even though I only lived there for a year and a half. The whole state's just so...sordid.
Rereading The Master and Margarita for the 100th time. When I was a kid, I had books fall apart on me from too many readings. It is nice to still have a few around that this happens with.
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Been trying to chart any particular differences in the reaction to A2O. Nothing is 100%, there are exceptions to every rule, but women seem to like it more than men, or more completely than men. This is interesting to me because the speaker is supposed to be a man, and I myself never think of myself as particularly "gendered," so I wonder if I am unknowingly speaking in a particularly female voice. Or maybe I really am speaking in a male voice and all the women like it (the straight ones, at least) because I am talking crazy husky romantic man talk and the men are secretly and strangely jealous of my magnetic Byronic ways.
Nah.
Still, I have tried very much to make this book about how I think (as opposed to what I think). The method of my thoughts. Stripped as much as I can. Like I said before, it is hard for me not to dress and smooth the thoughts as I edit; to render them anodyne and unassailable. It is hard for me to be raw, and I am probably not all that raw even in the first instance.
Also trying to gauge the difference between poet reader and layperson readers. Some of the latter are far more intuitive and, well, seem to "get" it more. These poems are weird for me because usually I write on a very superficial, humorous, nonmusical level, and these are a conscious effort to write something more opaque, to purposefully obscure the story. It is hard to walk the line between too obscure and too open. Some people seem to be completely confused as to what the hell is going on; others seem to get it all too easily. I have had comments like, "you can stop dropping this hint, I got it twenty poems ago," paired with, "man, I am glad you kept repeating X; it took me until the very last poem to figure that out."
It is also a book of poems that works as a single poem; I feel like there aren't very many that work on their own. Reading one is like "what? bleh" and reading four or five is like, "mmm....yes yes yes."
At least I mostly like it now. A year ago, I could read it on Monday and declare myself a genius, and read it on Tuesday and declare myself an idiot. It is more focused now, and I am more or less okay with the whole. Resisting the overediting impulse. And happy again for all the help.
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I picked up my mexican wrestler poster from the frame shop the other day, and put him up over my bed:
I slept happily beneath his watchful gaze on Saturday night, but on Sunday, I hung up some more new pictures, and then one of them fell off the wall, and I became worried Santo would also fall off the wall and kill me in my sleep by dinging the corner of his frame into my skull and I couldn't sleep because of it last night and had to take him down.
I put him back up just now because I weighed him and he only weighs ten pounds and the nails/hangers I used are good for pictures up to 20 pounds, and I tested the wall and don't think he can really fall off. But still. If I don't blog for a few days, you can assume I've been killed by a rogue Mexican wrestler.
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Did another full round of edits on A2O this weekend. Started looking at the comments collected thus far. First set didn't have too much. Many people have suggestions or changes but I can only make the ones that result in me going, "oh yeah." If you can help me say what I need to say better, then that is good. But I can't end up saying your things for you.
I feel good about the comments; they seem genuine. I am really grateful for people actually reading this thing and making an effort to care, to help it. It has been stuck inside my head for so long; it is sort of painful to let it out into other people's hands and good that they are handling it, if not gently, then with affection or a sense of duty.
It is also really interesting to see what people love or hate about it. Most people like it at least a little (or profess to). And what people hate works for me. It's usually what I want them to hate. It is a new thing for me to write poems with intentional irritants. What is hard for me is making sure that I don't overedit. I don't want this book to become too smooth. I want there to be things that rub raw, that show their seams. That is what I would say to people who are looking at friends' manuscripts: it is okay not like things as long as you have reasons. People don't always write poems for you to like them, and your reasons for disliking them may tell the poet whether what they're doing is "working" or not.
I also like it when people's comments are exactly opposite. "I love poem A" "Poem A sucks!" That makes me feel like I'm really doing something right. It makes me more worried when everyone says they love something. It was that way with "Mayport" and the drunken sailors. Nobody has ever said they didn't like them, which makes me think they don't risk enough.
Fixed my permalinks. It was a slow process. HTML is a zen practice for me. Much trial and trial and error.
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