Dusting Off After a Stumble

A rejection sure can take the wind out of the old sails. Puntitas was feeling very writerly and accomplished all week. She revised, pondered, experimented. She had a positive workshop with a friend, who really liked her narrative essay and gave her helpful suggestions. She had an idea for a new poem. Then she received yesterday’s rejection, which was especially disappointing because she thought it was the most likely of the journals to take her work.

Today Puntitas caught up on email, had lunch with a friend, floated around the house doing very little of consequence, spoke to two other friends on the phone, finished the fudge in the kitchen. She thought about working on the essay, thought about working on her tables of contents, thought about revising her resume for a couple of possible jobs. But she didn’t do any of those things, and she didn’t turn off her computer because the week’s activity had gotten her into the habit of writing, and not writing was making her restless.

So Puntitas decided she’d do a little writing anyway–start that poem that had been rolling around in her head, the one with the ending, but no beginning or sense of voice. She wrote a few short lines that didn’t grab her, a vague description that didn’t do much even on the literal level. She thought about them to figure out what to do next, And she realized that the items she described were nested, like Russian dolls. That was the first metaphor she came up with—Russian nesting dolls, which is physical enough and universally understood, but not really part of Puntitas’ experience, more a literary cliche. She asked herself what other mundane thing nested or stacked naturally, and she thought about the almond tree she grew up with, the nut inside a woody shell inside a suede-like hull. She added that to her draft, only she didn’t know the name of the hull, So she went to Wikipedia to read about almonds.

Wikipedia is a beautiful thing.

Puntitas learned lots of interesting things about almonds. They’re native to the Middle East and Mediterranean. The wild varieties have pink blossoms and are poisonous, even lethal in large enough amounts. the domesticated varieties have white flowers and are safe to eat. The almonds themselves are technically not nuts, but a drupe. If the shell has been removed, they’re shelled, and if the shell is present, they’re unshelled—the most amusing part of the entry hands down. They’re related to the apricot, And forty-two percent of the world’s production is cultivated in Puntitas’ home state.

She read the entire entry mostly as an avoidance mechanism, but when she returned to her draft to properly name the shell and hull, she discovered she could use these details to shape the poem, to develop the speaker and set up the conceit. She wrote two expository stanzas and thought about what images and information they would lead to. Then she stopped, with the plan that she would continue tomorrow. She doesn’t think this poem will draft itself, but she does think that it will allow her to discover its rhythm and help her write it.

Puntitas is sleepy now. It is time for bed.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. Tudge and _first Comes Love_ by M. Balogh.

Celebration and Perplexity

Puntitas sent out her first chapbook in years and got a prompt rejection the following day. That same day, of the five hours spent submitting, she also sent out two poems she really likes and hopes to find homes for. The day after the chapbook rejection, she got a nibble from the journal that received the two poems:

The editor liked the language in both, but found the line breaks distracting. If Puntitas would be open to resubmitting them as prose poems, the editor would love to reconsider them.

Puntitas does not know what a prose poem is. She’s read a few, and she knows they’re all the rage, but the hammer-and-nails part of her brain doesn’t know what to do to a piece of writing to make it a prose poem.

The news was frustrating for Puntitas, so in typical Puntitas style, she sulked, whined to a friend, sat inertly at her keyboard, had absolutely no idea. Then admitting herself desperate for publications and further admitting that she especially wanted these two pieces to thrive, Puntitas pulled up the documents and used the find-and-replace-all command to brutally substitute hard and soft line breaks with regular spaces (after copying the file in case some other editor liked the work as Puntitas meant it).

Sans line breaks, Puntitas read the poems again, only this time she did it the way she reads prose, and what she discovered is that a few of her long, involved sentences collapsed in their own complexity. She fiddled here and there, nothing that anyone would notice, and she put a blank line in whenever she started a new idea. She didn’t think the pieces were any more or less comprehensible, but she did resolve to go back to other poems to read them this way for editing.

When she finished, she resubmitted both pieces. A day or two later, the editor wrote back to say she was prepared to accept one of the poems if Puntitas agreed to a few changes. CHANGES? Who dare talk to a writer about CHANGES? Puntitas read on with a mixture of anger, fear, and shame (not really sure why).

The changes were surprisingly … great. As Puntitas wrote it, the poem is a long fragment, a series of gerundives that suggest a nonstatic moment. Each idea is separated from its neighbor by a semicolon and developed and expanded with commas. There were also lots of and’s to create a rhythm. The editor, got rid of most of the commas, replaced the semicolons with commas, and stripped most of the and’s. The experience of reading suddenly reflected what Puntitas had been trying to do in the language, and Puntitas moved one step closer to understanding what a prose poem is. She’ll have to think about how another one of her pieces may benefit from this form of decluttering.

The other thing that happened when Puntitas read the final version—still no line breaks—is that she was disoriented and unmoored from her own concept of poetry writing. Puntitas wondered, not for the first time, what a line break is supposed to do. Her understanding is that it should create a subtext of its own; draw attention to words, images, and relationships; and make the reading easier. She wondered what other poets think line breaks should be or do, And she wondered whether the line breaks have been a deciding factor for other editors.

For Puntitas personally, one of the functions of the line break is to establish that what she is doing is writing poetry. For her the distinction among creative nonfiction prose, fiction, and poetry is nebulous, and the distinction between such forms as prose poem and flash fiction is too confusing to ponder. So writing in line breaks and attending to their meaning makes her mindful of the need to compress language and convey abstract meaning through sensory experience, evocative action, and physical contour—what the sighted world summarizes in the visual metaphor of the image. Hence her reluctance to instantly do away with all the line breaks she’s worked so hard to develop).

One or two days later still, Puntitas received another acceptance. This one was in the form of a letter that was both sharp and funny, the sort of missives cranky old nuns fire off in novels and on TV. This editor was also inclined to accept a piece if Puntitas allowed her to make changes, like capitalize a proper noun, correct a spelling mistake, and remove a lone parenthesis. Puntitas actually fought the urge to bow her head and whisper ma’am when replying to the message to agree to the changes and apologize for her slovenliness.

She’s contacted the other journals about the acceptances, but she’s a little nervous about it since the pieces aren’t actually in print yet.

Puntitas reads _Garden of Lies_ by E. Goudge plus the two knitting books. She’s found a couple more knitting books that she can’t wait to get through.

Puntitas and the Ignorance of Others

After a computer calamity, Puntitas has been working on her big, ugly translation project, which she has had to start over because of said event. She has finished reading Blindness by Jose Saramago, which she dislikes for a number of reasons, the easiest to sum up being that responding to a metaphor (i.e., the eyes are the windows of the soul) is ignorance and masturbation if the response isn’t informed by active inquiry (i.e. interrogation of the assumptions that underlie the metaphor, observation of the literal components of the image, experimentation that leads to deeper reflection on the subject). Puntitas’ appreciation of the novel has suffered further after a consultation with an oral surgeon who thinks it’s amazing that blind people can walk and impossible for them to participate in a routine doctor-patient encounter. (The surgeon kept talking about having someone translate for Puntitas and was bothered when Puntitas asked why that would be necessary as both were speaking the same language. Puntitas almost … skin-of-the-teeth almost … added, “I mean you’re speaking in Stupid, but since I hear that language quite often, I’ve learned to puzzle it out.”) Puntitas believes that this surgeon very probably shares Saramago’s perception of the blind as a helpless collective of shit covered needs–alegories about alienation, blah-blah notwithstanding. No, Puntitas hasn’t gotten over either the awful surgeon or the fact that the only characters in the novel who have ordinary rational thoughts are sighted. But Puntitas leaves all that for another day.

In the realm of Puntitas the emerging writer–another rejection arrived today. It came from the Missouri Review, a typical form letter on a half sheet of paper. Someone wrote a note, thanking me and telling me to try the magazine again some time. I would have taken it for a generic kindness, like Howard Junker’s “onward,” except that the person who wrote it actually used my name. That almost made up for the writer’s not wanting some of my best work.

I’ll need to send more batches of poems out soon.

Puntitas reads _Maridos_ by A. Mastreta.

The Poetry Reading

The friend who was in Korea during my post office crisis has returned with the news that she’s accepted a job offer there. She doesn’t leave till the end of the month, but we met tonight for our last or second to last evening. Though I’m really excited for her, I will miss her very much because she is one of my closest friends. She is also the person with whom I spend most time at the bookstore, and she has a knack for turning metaphors into disconcerting social events. Today, for instance, Puntitas learned that writing a dissertation is like a bowel impaction that requires much time at the toilet, a considerable amount of grunting and groaning, sundry medical consultations, more straining, sweat, pushing, heaving, fiber therapy, enema therapy, and a final surging-tearing-thrusting-expelling passing through. Puntitas learned too that she didn’t have to eat all of her refried beans and that she’d lost her craving for a dessert of flan.

After dinner and coffee, we came back to my house to talk more about my friend’s new job and all the packing, selling, and storing she’d have to do before the move. As we were sitting in my study, where my manuscripts live in their yard-tall Federal Express boxes, she asked if she could read my work. This wasn’t the first time, but it was the first time I said yes (except for the one time I showed her something in progress [after much begging on her part] and got annoyed at her lack of workshop skills). Today the experience was very different.

Initially, it was boring because my friend just read silently, giggling or making the odd Hmm or huh.

Then it was mildly annoying when my friend suddenly started commenting on one of the poems, a sonnet. A word was misspelled. The final image didn’t make sense. The speaker wasn’t very sympathetic. The annoyance was not about the feedback itself, which was useful. It was about the insistence. Puntitas was done with the poem. Yes, she’d revised it the weekend before. Still, she was done, and she had finished, and the only thing she had any interest in doing with it was putting it in the mail. Then that indifference was its own revelation, and Puntitas sat back to let time keep on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future.

Several hours or minutes (depending on the specific time continuum) later, my friend went back to reading, and the experience got interesting. As she read, my friend announced the title of each poem. She giggled or grunted as before. This time, however, she also read lines or images out loud, or she made brief comments at certain points. In other words, she did what people do when they’re reading a book for pleasure. Those comments, brief and spontaneous though they were, provided lots of helpful information about how the work was coming through to her. Her other observation—that, if she didn’t know Puntitas personally, she would assume Puntitas to be a lesbian—went into the same mental compartment as the dissertation-as-bowel-impaction image.

After my friend had left, I thought more about the sonnet. It wasn’t the usual obsessive thinking that belongs to a work in progress, rather the indifferent consideration of someone who has no stake in the outcome. My friend was right about the ending. It includes an image that explains the speaker’s attitude, but the image doesn’t make sense because it can’t literally be true. I opened the file and began by tackling the misspelling. The changes came relatively quickly—all in the final sestet. The finished poem reads more like natural speech; the rhyme scheme is less slant; and the closing image works on a literal and poetic level. I think both the temporal and emotional distance were what made the revisions easy.

Puntitas reads _The Barred Window_ by A. Taylor.

The Submission Blues

In terms of submitting either individual poems or my full manuscripts, I’m going to have to come up with a better plan of attack. I’ve spent my day at my computer, reading submission guidelines and articles on writing contests. So far, I’ve submitted one batch of poems and worked myself down into a pit of publishing despair.

It all started with a short-lived happy moment, wherein I found some fragments of old poems. A couple of them got summarily deleted, but three had interesting images and suggested interesting possibilities, though the actual directions they took were mostly not worth the travel. I also found one very long poem, which is very exciting. In its current prose form, it’s five and a half single-spaced pages, and it’s a lot more polished than I remembered. By the time it’s done, it can turn out to be a chapbook length poem.

The word “chapbook” was where the downward spiral began. The moment I had that thought, one of the Main Street Rag judges comments came into my head, something like “There’s a chapbook in there somewhere.” Suddenly my nicely photocopied manuscripts swam to the forefront of my consciousness, weak poems getting weaker by the minute.

To keep from hyperventilating, I reminded myself that, when I settled down to serious revision, I didn’t use a third of the poems on my hard drive. Half of the poems I did use underwent enough revision for even a casual reader to notice. So while some poems may be weaker, they’re not necessarily weak.

Then I decided to submit one of those weaker poems, and I spent an hour or more revising it yet again. I changed lines, phrases, and words, nothing substantive enough for anyone else to notice. The poem is written in blank verse with a relaxed ABCCAB rhyme scheme. Though I paid attention to the line breaks and feel good about most of them, I stopped editing when I started experiencing the overwhelming compulsion to turn the poem into free verse. Yes, the form is important to me, part of the tribute to the content, so no, I don’t really want to change it.

Anyway, I added the changes to the manuscript file, submitted the revised poem, and called it a day. I’ve got so much work pending that I may take a few days off from this while I figure out how to submit without getting incredibly discouraged.

Plot and Collaboration–a post that is less interesting than the name suggests

Puntitas has been feeling very philosophical this week. She has done no writing, but she has read a lot and thought many writerly things.

Well, I did do a little pre-pre-writing. I’ve been eating lots of figs lately and getting poetic vibes from them, so I spent an afternoon searching for fig references in the Bible. The line that jumped out at me as being most obviously lyrical was this one:

Isaiah 28:4
That fading flower, his glorious beauty, set on the head of a fertile valley, will be like a fig ripe before harvest— as soon as someone sees it and takes it in his hand, he swallows it.

But more inspiring was the closeness with which the fig is connected to the body. It’s a symbol of security and stability (the Israelites repeatedly complain to Moses that there are no figs, olives or grapes where he has taken them, and the prophets often speak of the possibility of a land where each person can sit under his/her fig). Its leaves clothe Adam and Eve after the fall; it stands in for people or valuable goals in prophetic discussions in both testaments; and Jesus curses it in a wonderful show of humanity (Matthew’s version is the most lyrical and didactic, and Mark’s being the funniest: Jesus curses it in one passage, and in another he and his disciples walk past it, which prompts Peter to say, “wow, that tree you cursed sure is shriveled”).

The next step in the plan was to go outside, examine the tree, and eat some figs while pondering figly things, but I haven’t made it that far because it’s been way too hot outside and I haven’t managed to talk myself into the long sleeves that will keep the fig rash down to a minimum. Why Adam and Eve would put the leaves against their crotches is the real mystery.

What I did instead was finish reading The Shack, which led to thoughts on plot and collaboration. The book itself struck me as a nice read for a young protestant soul of about high-school age, new to pondering spiritual dilemmas. (Puntitas deletes a couple of catty sentences about the writer’s self-aggrandizement and moves on to her point.) Young says that he sent his manuscript to a writer he’d knew casually, that the writer contacted someone involved in writing for the screen, and that the three of them collaborated on the project. He’s vague about the nature of the collaboration, but my sense is that the writer friend gave him general advice on craft and workshoppy feedback on the manuscript, while the screen writer gave him advice on how to turn a philosophical discussion into a filmable plot.

I know one piece of advice I give to students and to people interested in the craft of writing is to imagine what this situation would look like on film, and I asked myself a variation of that (how can you say that in images?) a lot while revising my poems, but being of the Henry James half-the-story-happens-in-the-head school of thought, I will have to remember to ask myself this question frequently when I start revising my stories.

About collaboration, I’ve always wanted to do it. A couple of my friends and I have talked about it. One friend and I even wrote a few chapters together, and another friend and I tried it as well. But I’m not sure how it’s done. What I’d like to do is to collaborate on a story written from two points of view, where we agree on characters and a general plot and each person writes from one point of view, either responding to the other’s or writing from the outline and general discussion. What one friend and I did was talk about the story; then he wrote a draft and I revised it, a la Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl in _The Last Theorem_; but I don’t think he was as happy about that arrangement as I was.

My editing project has been the closest thing to collaborating that I’ve done. I don’t count it because I don’t have any real say in the planning and because I don’t get real credit for it, as far as I know, but once the manuscript is in my inbox, I have card blanche, so I should be more positive about the whole experience.

I’d ramble on longer, but I just noticed the time, and I have a play to get ready for.

Puntitas reads _Medicus_ and _Terra Incognita_ by R. Downie. She has a secret crush on Simon Vance, who reads everything beautifully, has an excellent sense of timing, and will find himself drawn to her when he goes through his dumpy-round-forty-somethings-with-poor-social-skills-and-shabby-job-prospects phase. She is still on hiatus from _The Secret Magdalene_ by K. Longfellow though she did read a chapter or two at some point.

Counting Down

After much wasteful procrastination, Puntitas has had a productive weekend. She wrote a new poem last night, one of those poems that come of themselves with a little prodding, the kind that can stand and walk and speak in telegraphic sentences when they’re born so they can go into the mail with minimal nurturing at home, and today she has gotten over the last of the hideous hurdles in the damn poem she’s been working on forever—well, off and on since Easter more or less.

Both poems have been interesting experiences. The one I wrote last night was inspired by the Independence Day celebration, which has always struck me as far more Dionysian in nature than Halloween or even Carnival. I’ve never quite been able to explain why that is, but eight years ago, when the good home schooling Mennonite neighbors argued over whether to let their screaming five-year-old go ahead and light a Fountain (Mom was for allowing her in order to teach a lesson about obedience and parental judgment while Dad objected on the grounds that the resulting emergency room trip would ruin the party and spoil all the food), I came close to putting it into words. This year, with all the forest fires and talk of global warming, I found the perfect context. I didn’t write it out there and then because my mother and I were having such a nice time laughing at the neighbor’s silliness and munching on big pieces of fresh fruit, that getting up for the note taker only to tune her out seemed crass. Later, of course, the moment was gone, and I didn’t know if I could recreate the piece.

Sunday night, when I did write it out, the poem was different from what I had imagined. While I remembered the general movement of the piece, I didn’t remember all of the elements that got me from the opening image to the climactic ending. I also didn’t know how to prepare for the final image and overall conceit without giving it away or making the poem feel like a riddle. What I did instead was to suggest the conceit in two places and organize the details to do the rest of the work. I won’t know whether I pulled it off until I read the thing relatively fresh.

One pleasant surprise was the closing image. I couldn’t use the one I had planned and was floundering around for a direction to take the poem when I read what I had and realized it was already somewhere. I did a little tweaking to make the ending less abrupt and went back to work on making the conceit stand out enough. Then I was done.

I hope it’s as complete as I think it is the next time I work on it. There is one image I really like, but I’m nervous about it not quite blending in with the rest of the poem. I can tie it into the general conceit, but that may be more trouble than it’s worth. I’ll just have to wait to decide.

The other poem has been a struggle. I’ve stuck with it because I really like its potential. I like the idea, the images, and the general narrative arc. Done right, it can turn out to be an excellent piece, but maintaining a balance between exposition and metaphor, resisting bathos, keeping two ideas separate while using one as a conceit for the other—all have been extremely difficult for me. On top of all of that, I’m not sure that I have the right life experience to write it. It’s about marriage, and I’ve based it on conversations with and observations of some of my married friends, but having never been married or involved with anyone for a long period of time, I’m nervous that I may not be true to the speaker’s feelings.

During our last tussle, I did some rearranging. That made for a stronger draft, but it also created a massive gap that called for the speaker’s history and a link to both the present situation and the metaphor for her marriage. Since then, I’ve been researching the linking details and thinking about how to integrate them into the details of her history.

Today’s mission was to fill in that gap even if the work was far from polished. The gap has definitely been filled. Again, it’s a matter of waiting a few days to read the poem fresh and have a more objective sense of how to direct my revisions. At this point, I’m thinking it would be helpful to have someone read and comment on it. I’ve got one or possibly two people in mind, and depending on the next round of revision, I may ask them.

I think the next time I work on my book, I want to read the really long poem. The last time I read it, I thought it was just about done. The changes I made involved cutting out excess in the final section. I was only concerned about an important transitional point, where too much snipping could affect pacing.

Puntitas reads _Quiller Salamander_ by A. Hall and _The Zookeeper’s Wife_ by D. Ackerman.

In the Details

When is a piece of writing ever done? That’s the question I struggle with most. I think things are done. Then I read them again months or years later, and I realize they’re not. That more than anything keeps me from feeling like an accomplished writer.

Real writers know. Real writers read their work years later, say, “I would write that better now,” but feel satisfied that the poem or story was written well. I write, and when I read the piece again from a stranger’s distance, I think, “This is the work of an amateur.”

Most often, the devil for me is in the details. Without much trouble, I catch gaps in the logic or the plot, and I catch inconsistencies in images or characters,. Where I’m likely to find problems is in the nuance suggested by all the little details: the gesture a character makes at a key point in the dialog, the shape or size of an object on a table, the length and rhythm of a paragraph or line. Sometimes they contradict me. Sometimes they distract. Sometimes they do nothing. Sometimes they do too much. The frustration is that, when they’re working, I know God is in the details.

Last Sunday, I reread my two sonnets and another one of the poems I’ve been working on relatively recently. Over all, I like the sonnets. They’re clear, detailed, and easy to read. The endings, which had been my great concern, hit the right notes in both what they say and how they leave the reader feeling. On the Shakespearean sonnet, I unchanged most of what I’d changed the last time I worked on it. That realization was what ultimately decided me to call the poem finished.

When I read the Miltonian sonnet, I discovered it read much better than I expected. I spent most of my energy changing details in the octave to develop the image in the title. The bony whore seems more out of place than ever, but she was too helpful in the writing and is too precise about the nature of the wait for me to let go of her yet, so I may send the poem out a few times before I can get up the nerve to replace her with some other story.

The third poem is one I’ve never mentioned here. I like it for lots of different reasons. It was well received in workshop. It’s got a solid build. It’s a tribute to the power of art. It made me feel close to the friend who inspired it. I’ve sent it out a few times, but it hasn’t been picked up. Each time I read it, I notice some of the details “aren’t there yet,” a wonderful expression I heard to describe a lack of readiness to understand or articulate, and though more of the details are contributing to the wholeness of the poem now, many of them still are not. How long will I have to wait? How long?

Starting with the Image

I’ve had very little inspiration where writing is concerned. Too many other things are cluttering my head this week, most of them work related, something I’ll probably write about sooner or later. I did have one tiny tremor of an idea one morning, one of those thoughts that flits into the consciousness while I lay in bed waiting for the alarm clock to ring. Three images—a child’s ball suspended in the sky at sundown, the optical illusion of a foot next to a cloud, a woman standing at the foot of some stairs with her spine arched completely back, her hands on the lower steps—came to me, starting with the last and ending with the second. There was another image, a reaching or scooping hand. At first, I thought it was random. Then it helped me gather the other images together, developing the cloud image into a playground swing, the bar overhead and the chains that attach the seat.

Before the fingers enclosed the images into a beginning, the memories just floated around in my head, shuffling like snapshots into different orders, revealing more details, fading, growing again. Each reminded me of having wanted to center a poem around it, but until the hand caught each up and held it against its palm, nothing united them, gave them meaning.

In bed, out of nowhere, I started to feel the peculiar lightness and energy of a piece of writing clamoring to make it to the hard drive, that flaring of experience. If I teach a poetry class, I will probably tell my students that images are pictures or sensory experiences evoked or elaborated to explain what something means for the speaker or why it is important. But images are more mysterious. They’re the nut of a poem, the originating impulse, the supporting detail. They tell narratives in layers, In my case, each image told the same story, but it had something different to say about that story.

As I lay there, the images became more defined. The hand came clearly and fully into focus, and I understood immediately that it was the story all the other images were telling. Part of me knew that I’d need to hang on tight to whatever was developing because I’d have to get up in five minutes to get ready for an early appointment. Part of me wanted to tell the appointment to screw itself so I could let the images play out.

What made the images a moment, rather than the draft of a poem, was that the vast descending hand suddenly seemed cliché, and the narrative, one that I’ve written about before. I know that, as with the Shakespearean sonnet, some narratives are worth telling more than once, but all at once, this one didn’t seem worth retelling at all.

That realization turned all the airiness into flat, dense disappointment. I thought about the seeds of two other poems I’ve been carrying around. They’re images and general thoughts, but something—the right detail, perhaps?—is missing. I wish I knew what would make them bloom. Maybe I can use the ball, the swing, and the arching woman to figure it out.

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent (continued)

My Miltonian sonnet has a title now, and excerpt from the original. At the moment, I think it’s hot stuff, but right now I have no judgment.

I’m bathing in the post partal effluvia of my own brilliance. Not arrogance: the cherished delusion that evaporates all too quickly. Why is it that whatever we write is perfect for about a month and only that all too fleeting month? After that, public bathroom graffiti is a goal to strive for. Alas, alack.

I read the sonnet again two days ago. I did a little tinkering, substituting words that don’t conjure images with those that do (harried whore to bony whore) and snipping a few function words (mostly articles) to help the images roll into one another. I spent a while on the last line, which sounded about as meaningful as the cryptic writing on the stall.

When I reread the poem just now, I’d forgotten about the last line. The changes seem to work though the image is different from what I had been going for. For my original idea to make sense, the reader would have to know what a talent is (a unit of measure in money) in order to get a really bad pun that isn’t particularly clever even at the most superficial level. The line as it actually reads, however, draws on the image of the houses like tombs and does something more complex.

Were I not floating in my own effluvia, I could never admit that poems really do write themselves. It’s a matter of getting the tool at the word processor to let them.