Marie Gauthier

Vincent could be & has been worse, but darling boy is still unwell. In between the interludes of obvious illness, he is variously rambunctious and lethargic. Irony of ironies: Nature has chosen this Week of the Influenza Outbreak to spring into Full Spring with gusto.

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The moving-on-now-revise-later aspect of NaPoWriMo does not come naturally to me, but instead of working on “Gravity,” yesterday’s poem, tonight I finished another draft. More on that later. But in this vein of drafts: for the last few months I’ve been slowly exploring a fascinating book, Black Lightning: Poetry-in-Progress, edited by Eileen Tabios (Temple University Press, 1998), unfortunately out of print now. I bought mine at this great used bookstore in Hatfield, Troubadour Books, nearly two years ago.

It’s a daunting book, oversized. The editor, with a selection of poets (such as Timothy Liu and Kimiko Hahn, to mention the two that especially struck me), explores the revision process of several poems, from actual drafts, first second third etc, sometimes composites of several, to the final poem, discussing the choices within each poem with the poet! It’s an utterly unique fly-on-the-wall view of a variety of poetic processes — something I find infinitely interesting — and it’s no overnight read, either! Like most writer-types, I suspect I’m strange & perhaps even doing everything wrong, and it reminds me that every process is a singular one. And following these amazing creative minds as they revise is both amazingly reassuring and revelatory.

On to my draft. Per usual, for a short time only:

[…gone…]