The Caretaker's Manual

After a few months of organizing and revising earlier this spring (I went back to work full-time in January), I'm happy to say that my book, titled "The Caretaker's Manual," is finally done. In the excitement of finishing it, I somehow neglected to mention it here, where I've been tracking the development of said collection. Good lord. Anyway, click on the link to take a look and order a hardback copy of your very own from Lulu.com.

Thanks to everyone who followed my posts and offered encouragement for this little project. I hope you like the poems.

Final Week

With the holidays coming up next week, I'm in the final days of AWY. There's still a lot to do, but I've been lucky enough to get this week off of work to concentrate on finishing. By Thursday night, I hope to have retyped all of my stronger poems into the manuscript and started the afterword I want to write about the process. That seems--at least from the vantage point of 9 AM on Monday--well within the realm of possibility. Talk to me Wednesday night and I will almost certainly be in despair. Well, we'll see.

Also, I'm very happy to have received a positive response from the Virginia Quarterly Review about a poem I submitted late this summer. Editor Ted Genoways wrote to suggest a few possible areas for improvement and invited me to return a revised version. I'm optimistic that he'll take the poem, provided that I do not manage to make it worse through my fiddling. Consequently, I'll also be spending some considerable time this week thinking through those edits so that I can respond soon after the new year. Needless to say, I would be enormously excited to place a poem in VQR.

How do I feel as I look toward the end of AWY? That's a question I've heard from many of my friends, and one for which I lack a clear or definite answer. Forlorn? Anxious? Relieved? It's complicated. It varies by the hour. It will have to be the subject of another post.

Counting Down

With the end of AWY fast approaching, I've continued to prioritize ordering and editing the poems I've produced so far. Now that I have figured out the basic structure, I'm focusing on organizing each of the four sections and revising the individual poems they contain.

Last Friday I spread each section across the floor and arranged and rearranged the sequences until I was satisfied with the basic progression. I also took out a few poems that I'm not sure are salvageable, and shifted a few others between sections. It looks like I'll have about nine poems per section. Now I'm retyping each of those poems into the document that will be the full manuscript. It takes some time to do, but I find that retyping my work draws my attention to flaws and possibilities for revision in a way that nothing else does. It has already helped me to identify significant improvements in two poems I felt needed a lot of work.

So that's the recipe for the remainder of this week: retype, revise, repeat. I hope to have at least three of the four sections in good shape before the end of the year, but that won't be easy.

Piling Poems

Yesterday and today I spent some more time sketching out the structure of my collection. I started by trying to figure out which poems I wanted as the first and last of the manuscript, which turned out to be easier than I'd anticipated. Both are poems I like a lot and they just seemed to make sense in those positions.

After that I began looking through the remaining poems that I'd triaged for further edits, thinking about where I wanted each one to fit in. I printed them all out and put them in piles on the coffee table. This was hardly a sophisticated or especially careful process; I just went with my gut reaction of whether each one should be towards the beginning, the end or the middle. Ultimately I realized that I'd begun ordering them into four different groups, so perhaps "beginning, middle 1, middle 2 and end" is more accurate. (I meant to take a picture, as this is one of the few occasions where a photo could benefit a writing blog, but couldn't be bothered. Sorry -- I realize I am lame.)

Anyway, I did not make any effort to pay much attention to the specific order of the poems within those piles, though I did make a mental note when I discovered one that seemed to hold promise as the first or last of a section. Now that I've got them into these smaller groupings, I've started to go through each one and think about what makes the most sense in terms of the internal progression, and identify any holes. Much to my amazement, it's gradually coming into shape.

Cataloging

As I was considering how best to start organizing the poems I've written this year into a coherent collection, I realized that I first needed to better understand what I had to work with. I could easily keep in mind my most (and least) successful drafts, but the remainder -- those that still needed work, but were promising -- were a blur. Likewise, I tended to forget about some of the older poems I'd written, which were eclipsed by newer drafts that retained the shine of recent experience.

I decided the easiest way to take stock of what I had written and determine where I needed to focus my energies in the weeks to come was to catalog my drafts systematically. I created a simple spreadsheet with the names of all my poems in one column and a kind of status rating in another. Then I spent about an hour and a half on Monday briefly reviewing each poem and assigning it a rating of 1-5 (1 being, "this poem is technically finished but deeply, embarrassingly flawed;" 5 being, "ready for publication and possibly fame and fortune"). I expected that most poems would earn 3's and that very few would earn 1's or 5's.

It was unscientific, to say the least, but if nothing else it gave me a sense of how the collection was shaping up. Curious about the results? Here you go.

Out of 74 total drafts:

• 9 got 5's -- all have been submitted to journals at one point or another
• 23 got 4's -- I consider these solid poems that just need a little more work
• 23 got 3's -- these strike me as good starts that require reshaping
• 15 got 2's -- wow, I really wrote a poem about shopping for housewares?
• 4 got 1's -- let's not talk about these anymore

An interesting if somewhat odd exercise. What I intend to do now is focus on the 4's and then do another screen of the 3's to figure out which of them really deserve further work. I'm also considering adding a third column to this spreadsheet that would provide an assessment of each poem's potential fit with the larger theme I have in mind for the collection; that way I could further triage which poems get my attention and which do not. In the end, I'm hoping to emerge with at least 40 poems that would rank as 5's. With 74 drafts right now, it's not looking so good for the 1's and 2's (seriously, housewares?).

Two Months to Go

Now home from New York, I'm looking to get back into rhythm as quickly as possible. The official end of AWY is on the horizon (just two months left), and I'm increasingly conscious of the limited time I have remaining -- especially since a couple of those weeks will be eaten up by the holidays. I don't expect that the end of December will bring an abrupt and complete halt to all things writing-related, but I do know that I shouldn't count on getting anything major done after that time. What I hope to do is have the first draft (at least) of a manuscript complete by January, so that I can work on revisions and final details in the following weeks.

Right now I'm focused on several things. First, I want to send out another submission -- it's been a while. Second, I need to review the poems I've drafted so far and start cataloging which ones are in good shape and which need work. That will also provide a foundation as I begin organizing everything into a coherent collection. Third, I'd like to begin work on an essay about this experience -- something I've had in mind as a goal from the outset. Finally, I'm going to start planning for some of the other details involved with getting a manuscript together (cover design, etc.).

Right. So, back to work.

What's in a Name?

The new poems I'm writing now are a lot more playful than many of those I've written in the past. I thought I would give you a peek through the keyhole at all the wackiness by listing some of the draft titles from the past month. Probably these are illuminating to some, alarming to others:

• "Babies"
• "Feeding Your Neighbor's Cat"
• "Lunatics"
• "What You Don't Know"
• "Weathermen"
• "Wipe On, Wipe Off"
• "The New World"
• "Kryptonite"
• "Dragonflies"
• "To Paper Towels"
• "When Walking on the Beach"
• "Being a Superhero"
• "Zombie Uprising"
• "Picnics"
• "When You Are Gone from Home"
• "Watch Out for Eagles"
  

Oh my. I should emphasize that many of these drafts will never, ever be allowed outdoors, but at least a third or so of them are keepers. Having submitted a few to the Kenyon Review yesterday, I can only hope I'm not delusional about that.

Just an Update

I'm feeling guilty, as usual, for not posting frequently enough. The truth is I've been running out of time in the mornings, when I've been prioritizing new poems. A few days ago I wrote about the lucky moment when I realized what kind of collection I wanted to put together, and fortunately that realization has continued to be a source of energy and inspiration. I've gotten some good feedback from my readers on the initial drafts that emerged from it and have been moving forward with others that I'm excited about. So good news there.

Speaking of readers, this weekend I also enjoined my friend and certified AWY reader Lars (who works in design) to help create a cover for my collection whenever I finish it. My current idea is to self-publish what I'm able to compile this year through Lulu.com or a similar site -- not so that I can claim I'm a published poet or anything ridiculous like that, but to have a record of what I was able to accomplish this year. I feel like that's important, regardless of whether I'm able to get the poems published elsewhere as well. In any case, I'm happy to have Lars on board.

What else? I need to send out a few more submissions, whenever I can get my act together on that. VQR still has a few poems of mine. I need to send a few more to Kenyon Review this month or next (to try to capitalize on an encouraging rejection I got earlier this spring), and I'm considering sending a few to a new literary journal here in Chicago, the Packingtown Review. As always, I'll keep you posted.

My Eureka Moment

I've written over and over again about the difficulties of writing and my struggle to find direction, so having a chance to share more positive news is thrilling. The short of it is this: the night before last, just before turning in, I had an idea for a poem. That doesn't sound like much, and it wasn't much, but I snapped the light back on and made a few notes so I wouldn't forget, then went to sleep.

The next morning, I came to realize that my late-night impulse was in fact just a small part of a larger epiphany. As I thought it over, I had the sensation of my confused thoughts and blurry writing inclinations suddenly coming into alignment. It was as if a single idle turn of a Rubik's cube made clear the solution. The collection of poems I wanted to write snapped into focus. Within an hour, I knew the theme, the types of poems it would include, the subject matter and tone, my approach, even a possible title. I saw how older poems I had written could be adjusted to fit the larger structure, and I realized that many of these poems would actually be far more successful with those changes -- that I was writing in that direction all along, I just didn't know it. Finally, I understood why one particular poem I had written over a year ago continued to resonate so strongly with me. It embodied all the qualities of the poems I now knew I wanted to write.

I admit I'm superstitious, so I don't want to say too much about the details right now, for fear of jinxing my own momentum. What I will say is that I've drafted two new poems since this realization, and I think they're good ones. If this keeps up, I'll share more of my thinking soon. In the meantime, huzzah for direction.