The last few days have been momentous for Puntitas the writer.
1. I made writing top priority in a tangible way. I took time off work, which means (1) I found someone to cover me on Friday and (2) I turned off my cell phone without checking messages for the official three-day weekend.
2. I spent most of my time writing. Yes, I did lots of knitting, reading, stewing, and avoiding as well. Any reports of steady diligence on this blog are obvious prevarications, but I devoted much time each day to researching and revising my poems. (I’ll have to write a future post on the research connected to one in particular.)
3. I found proof that I really do work on my stuff. Mostly when I ponder over my writerly life, I think about the many occasions wherein I whine and feel sorry for myself for the little progress I make over all. But over the weekend, I kept having the experience of opening a file intending to revise, revise only to discover that I’d done so already and that little or no additional revision was called for.
4. I read my work with some degree of objectivity. For the first time ever, I had a sense of how other people might understand specific pieces. I was able to recognize some poems as awful and others as interesting images or ideas but not actual wholes. I deleted about ten poems because they sucked, kept another ten because they were good seeds, and hung on to five more because they were pointless but important for me to write. I suspect I’ll be deleting more of the fifteen survivors because I also noticed that I’m no longer interested. I may want to come back to them later on, or I may just need more time for that final snip.
5. I revised with unprecedented abandon. When I write prose (fiction and non-), I’m a bold reviser. Cutting, deleting, Moving, substituting everything from words or descriptive details to character histories, chapters, or themes, often to the point where the original is unrecognizable, but with poetry, I’ve always been conservative in the extreme, rarely dealing with more than a line or two at a time. This weekend, I subjected my poems to the jigsawing I submit my prose to, and that felt good, truly liberating.
The less impressive part of this whole experience is that it was prompted by a poetry book deadline, which I missed. The official reason is that I needed to finish two new poems to include in one of the book’s sections. The real reason is probably that sending books out is scary, but I need to get past that, and I’m giving myself a break because all the other things I mentioned here were big.
Puntitas reads _Knitting: A Novel_ by A. Bartlett, _The Ice Harvest_ by S. Phillips, and _the Cleaner_ by B. Battles.
