Chapbook Manuscript

I have successfully pulled together my first chapbook manuscript. I worked extensively on pulling together material yesterday from my archive of work. Making some modifications. Adding some items I previously had intended to leave out after meeting and discussing some of the material with a fellow poet. It encompasses forty pages of writing.

I am not quite ready to submit it for publication yet. Some of the work has been published already individually. Since I am attending a workshop in Iowa this weekend, I e-mailed a manuscript file to the two presenters. I will have an opportunity for a one-on-one secession with one of them during the workshop. This will give me yet another opportunity to perhaps refine it and make necessary adjustments.

The manuscript is titled (working title) Now In Color & Hysteria. So much of my poetry moves between strong social comment and humor. It is that combination that I preface this way: "Now In Color & Hysteria crosses the line between the grave issues of our day and the ridiculous. Changes in life and life altering experiences. Relationships and the relationship between man and his world."

This has been a slow process in coming together. I don't mean so much the writing of the poems, but the decision to create a multi-poem manuscript. Then deciding what goes in and what stays out. Sometimes we get so close to something it is hard to be objective. In all aspects of art, I think the creator is often his or her harshest critic. Writing is no exception to this, at least from my own experience. Even when you feel good about a piece, I find a week, six months down the road I often second guess. I suppose the non-static nature of poetry lends itself well to this sort of internal questioning.

At any rate, it was a happy occasion when I hit the send button to transfer the manuscript file via e-mail. Still, I don't get as I though I might that feeling of conclusion. Quite the contrary, I feel like this is a beginning.


Poems