Thinking about writing and timing and submitting and publishing. One thing that really rang for me as I was constructing “Now” was a friend saying to me (many times), “Not everything written has to be published.” (1)
I really took that to heart, esp. in late stages, when I cut 11 poems from the book. I think writers work out all sorts of stuff in the act of writing — but maybe some of it ends up being a private communique, self to self— (2)
Maybe it has a brief life in a magazine or anthology, and that’s the only place it lives—or we come back around to it, later, as if it came through the wormhole too early and didn’t “fit” whatever project was going on then. (3)
So I try not to throw poems away that don’t “fit,” and I try to be open to cutting poems that do “fit,” but perhaps are second xeroxes of better poems that also “fit” (4)
These thoughts occasioned by advising a friend to cut 50% of the poems in a 100 page ms. that wasn’t cohering strongly (luckily, after this, they are still my friend!) — and then a conversation about this: by what rubric does one do this cutting? (5)
Well, for every developing ms. this answer will be different, but it’s a good exercise, forcing yourself to make brutal cuts from mss—you can find out what a book really has potential to be. (6)
And them’s my mid-afternoon thoughts! Gonna make a sandwich and sit on the back porch. Hope everybody is finding a moment of peace—a moment!—on this Friday in June in our endless 21st Century etc.
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