Is Anybody Home?

It seems as if I don't exist, or at least if my email were proof of my existence, it would be very sad. Okay, I'm not getting offered any jobs. I haven't gotten any good po biz mail since early December. But what about simple informational emails? Are my recommendations up to date for such and such? Is the April reading happening there? Somebody answer me!

Of course, I'm exaggerating, but not that much. I thought I would babble on about this strange way I write poems, sometimes. If nobody's reading anyway, well …

I play games with the poem. I don't look at it for hours, sweating bullets. I don't look at it for hours at all. I may work on it for days or weeks or even longer, but it's in five minute snatches, where I pretend I'm not working at all. I look at it. I'll notice, for instance, a predominance of certain sounds at the end of a line, so I cut and paste to accentuate that. Then I turn away, do something else, check FB. Later, I sneak a peek. Do I like that? Does it work? Maybe not.

I switch to something else, something that's sat in my computer for years, or something scribbled in half sleep the night before. I work on that for five ten minutes, put it down, make a cup of tea. Sometimes I'm working on four poems at a time, maybe more. This method may have evolved when I was busier raising my son and running to work, but I don't remember if I used it then. I wrote a few stories and essays, recently, and enjoyed the ongoingness of the process. I like having something simmering on the back burner. I like lying in bed at night trying to find the one word that will fix a certain problem line (though I admit it's more often than not a recipe for insomnia).

Each time I go back to the poem, in those five-minute snatches, I see/hear different things. Sometimes the poem seems entirely new! I'm having fun with it, and yeah, that's a good thing.