Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Poems

On Friday, I will be submitting my thesis book, Bloomington Avenue.

What a tremendous sentence that is! Do you know what this means? This means that I am DONE!

Well, not quite. I am very nearly done though. This evening I am doing some final revisions (I feel like "final revisions" have included revisions that were far from final!) and preparing a draft to send off to a contest. In particular, there's this one poem about a tree that used to be across the street. One day a couple of summers ago, it started changing into its fall foliage in the middle of July--obviously it had died, or had been slowly dying over a long, long time. It was pretty remarkable to see a tree change that quickly in the middle of summer. Anyway, the poem has felt about half done since I wrote it and did initial revising back at the beginning of my MFA program experience. And last night, as I was contemplating a panel of instructors reading through my book, I realized that the poem was still very far from being done, and that if I turned in that draft, I would regret it. So I wrote some more! I think I took it a little bit too far--I have, evidently, this tendency to wax a little sentimental, particularly about the demise of things in the natural world--so I will be cleaning up a little excess from that poem tonight.

Then there's the task of page numbering. I somehow made it to the end of grad school without knowing how to properly format the page numbers in a paper where the first page needs no number, the table of contents need roman numerals, and the arabic numerals don't begin until page 4 or 5. I hate to resort to this, but I am not too proud to make a document that contains strictly page numbers and print them onto the already-printed draft.

I have high hopes for Bloomington Avenue. I think it is pretty solid as a book. I went with sections, which is something that I didn't think I would do! I had a working order of poems for quite a while, and as a strict academic exercise, I decided to shuffle them in to sections. What emerged were three sections that give the book some structure for its somewhat whimsical--and sometimes very short--poems.

So--off to revise. And then maybe sew.

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