Riding the Revision Trail

After many days or weeks of writerly slovenliness, Puntitas has done some revision. Last night, she worked on one of the poems she’s been revising lately, the one she discovered to be absolutely incoherent ten years after it was finished. The changes are still more than surface-level editing, but they’re no longer about changing the whole direction of the piece. After last night’s session, Puntitas thinks the poem will change very little from now on.

Today she also worked on a nonfiction prose piece she considered done. Its “done”-ness was determined ten years ago, so Puntitas believed it prudent to read it before launching it into the world.

As far as revisions go, most of what Puntitas did was surface-level, cutting wordiness, getting details to match up, clarifying vagueness, and removing repetition. While she’s happy with that work, she’s not willing to say the piece is done. Her plan had been to read the piece from beginning to end without tinkering, but she started to notice the sort of little glitches that are easy to forget, so she tinkered as she went along, losing all sense of the voice and tension of the piece. She’ll need to read it again in a day or two because she isn’t sure that the narrator’s central problem is clearly set up, explained, or resolved. The sections that are supposed to do that may not do enough and may commit the additional sin of interfering with pacing.

On a personal level, the piece made Puntitas cry, not that her writing is particularly moving, rather that the problem is still unresolved for her, a state of things which she knows, but was not expecting to react to so strongly. The piece may require an objective reader after some revision.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. Tudge.

Shifting Focus

Puntitas submitted more work today: One short story and three copies of the poetry chapbook. She may have sent two items out one day past the official deadline, but she’s hoping that the reading fee (in one case) and the general shortage of submissions (in the other) will encourage recipients to … well … receive.

The last time Puntitas read some of her work, she realized that she had not included a thematically related poem in the chapbook, So before printing today, she added it to the manuscript and moved another poem to a different place in the collection. The chapbook feels better now, and Puntitas thinks she should reexamine the order of the poems in the book-length collections in case other changes make sense.

She also read one of her short stories before sending it out. It’s ten pages long, which is flash fiction in the wordy realm of Puntitas’ prose. She had revised it carefully a couple of years ago, spending lots of time researching certain details to make sure she got them right. Today she read the story for the first time since then, and she liked it very much, making only half a dozen surface level changes. The story leads up to a small moment that is nonetheless important, as so many small things are. Puntitas likes it and will start sending it out regularly.

While she plans to continue tweaking a couple of poems, revising some drafts, and drafting new ideas, she will start shifting her focus to the fiction on her hard drive. Puntitas estimates that she has about a hundred pages of finished or nearly finished fiction that should be in the mail by the end of November. Beyond that, she’s got a novella and two stories in intermediate draft phase and another story that’s still pretty rough. Her goal is to shape all of these into a book-length collection by this time next year.

It feels like a realistic goal. The poetry books were officially finished almost a year ago. They’ve undergone so many changes that Puntitas has to toss out her old photocopies and consider making new ones. While she’s not completely satisfied yet, she has enough of a sense of completion to be willing to add to Kinko’s economic stability.

Puntitas reads _Where Are the Children_ by M. Higgins Clark.

His Hand Was Steady, But His Eye Was Odd.

Puntitas has had very few writerly thoughts since last post. Mostly this is because I’ve had a flu, mild from Sunday through Thursday, severe from Thursday through Saturday night, and finally back to mild. I will be ready for work tomorrow. Knock on wood.

A friend and I did go to a traveling production of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Were she building her blog today, Puntitas’ tag line would definitely read: “Her hand is steady, but her eye is odd.” For some unknown reason that line (okay, a slight variation thereof), which is repeated throughout the musical as a refrain, drew giggles from both my friend and me, even when it was sung after a tragic moment. Yes, the show was fabulous, the highlights being the scene in which Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney Todd cook up the pie scheme and the scene in which she reveals her feelings for him, but the line, which was written to rhyme with “Sweeney Todd,” sung on a sonorously descending string of notes, prompted the catty observations that even great writers put out dubious lines and that repeating said lines doesn’t make them any better, this last being an especially important lesson for Puntitas to learn.

I’ve been reading several books at once, the latest (my relaxing fever read) being Your Heart Belongs to Me, a Dean Koontz thriller about a man who undergoes a heart transplant only to have the heart’s previous owner want it back. This is how the publisher’s summary describes it. I’m halfway through the book, and the protagonist is only now going in to surgery.

I’ve read a lot of Koontz’ work, probably half of his bibliography, and I fall on the Koontz side of the King-vs.-Koontz debate, but I’m having trouble getting into this book. The most obvious reason is that the prose is a lot more purple than I remember. The last line of Part 1, which is the last line I read this morning, is a good example: “And the darkness darkled into something darker, then mere dark.” Yes, the rhythm is lovely, and used sparingly, lines like it can work, but the same rhythm and image can be evoked without calling self-conscious attention to the language : “The darkness deepened into something darker, then spread into a hollow dark.”

The other reason is probably that it’s taking a while to get to the story I was expecting. Having read the publisher’s summary, I was expecting to be at the heart transplant by a fourth of the way through the novel. When I got to that point in the book but not in the story, I realized that the plot was more complicated and that I should just go along with it.

Still another reason is that I’m not sure what to make of all the Edgar Allan Poe allusions. The protagonist has several episodes that sound like panic attacks, described in language that comes from “The Raven.” He also has anxiety dreams, which are evocative of Poe landscapes, and he’s plagued by the sort of paranoia and secretiveness that characterize Poe protagonists. The allusions seem heavy handed, especially when combined with the excessive language, so I find myself wondering what I’m supposed to make of it (unreliable narrator?) rather than just letting it draw me in and persuade or mislead me as is required by the story.

At this point, I’m reading as much to find out how the book ends as to track the doings of the protagonist. Sometimes the ending pulls everything together so as to make all the prior muddling worth it.

Puntitas reads _Virgins of Paradise_ by B. Wood, _A Sense of the World_ by J. Roberts, and _Your Heart Belongs to Me_ by D. Koontz.

Plotting Like a Script Writer

While waiting for my latest audio books to download, I googled Eva Navarro, the writer I’m currently reading. The book is the sort of science fiction I can tolerate: heavy on the character and plot, easy on the sci-fi. I’m actually enjoying it much more than I expected, but I will be happy to move on to something else.

Anyway, I found a book review and (an interview, the latter being on a Mac page, which profiles prominent Mac users. (Who knew?) One of her responses struck me because my own writing is exactly opposite of what she describes. Once I finish revising the stories I’ve already written, I think I’m going to try this method.

As background, I’ll say that one of the plot lines follows a script writer and her team at a television studio. That part of the novel smacks so much of taken-from-real-life that its readers don’t need to check the back of the book to know its author works in the business.

The interviewer observes that the book is structured like a film script and asks whether that was accidental or intentional.

Answer: I come from the world of advertising, where we’re all about the target audience, so I tried to use short sentences, small amounts of description, a scenic narrative style, and short chapters. I thought my readers would tend to be teenagers, used to reading scripts. I was wrong because the book has been equally well received by adults, who have enjoyed the multiple story lines and the large numbers of characters. …

http://www.faq-mac.com/noticias/6282/mujeres-mac-eva-navarro-guionista-productora-escritora#

Of course, when I think of this sort of writing, I think of James Patterson, whose books are written to be read once. (I’m not knocking them. I’ve read eight or ten, and I’ll probably read more.) They contain the right combination of action, stock characters, and classic conflicts to keep the reader hooked, but they don’t spend enough time developing character and theme to make his work linger long after the book is closed.

My mistake has been to associate the style of writing Navarro describes with the product Patterson delivers. The protagonists of Navarro’s two story lines have enough demons and complexity for me to wonder about them while I’m not reading, and as I reflect on other books I’ve read, it occurs to me that the same formula has been used to produce more resonant novels, Pillars of the Earth being a good example.

Now Puntitas really will go away.

Puntitas reads _El llanto de la comadreja_ by E. Navarro.

Closer and Closer

Still on email hiatus, I’m also still working on my books. When I added page length numbers to my list of poems, I realized I’d miscounted somewhere along the way. As of now, I have ninety-four pages of finished work. Yesterday, I still had only ninety-two.

I spent most of my day writing since my appointments either got canceled or no showed. I made my page discovery about halfway through the afternoon and have to admit I got pretty discouraged.

The feeling grew when I received an urgent request for a translation, which has to be done by Tuesday morning. Of course, no one else is available, and of course, it’s really, really important. It’s also long (ten pages), hard to read (faded faxes of poor copies), and full of the sorts of details that need to be checked and double checked as one goes. Why these documents weren’t sent to the translator a week ago is a mystery. The fact that my contract with this particular agency compensates far below the national average and makes no allowances for pay increases when dealing with rush jobs and poor copy is a definite frustration. Yes, I know I could have said no, but official ethics aside, I think that translators and interpreters have a certain obligation to provide their services even when they’re not being paid to do so, like off-duty doctors and nurses. These documents are affidavits needed for court. Their presence or absence can make a material difference in the life of another person, so the mechanism of obligation falls into place for me.

Anyway, when I went down town to pick up the job and actually counted the pages, I had a moment of weepy frustration on the sidewalk especially when I juxtaposed that with the fact that I was still four pages short of finishing my books. I kept myself together by deciding to give myself an extra day on the poetry, putting off the translation for Saturday afternoon. At that point, I had completed one page of the new poem, the one that will include three or four other poems, but I was still no where near finishing and am now exactly where I was then.

I came home to open my iffy folder and think about what could be salvaged. I deleted one poem that is just hopeless, and I pulled up another, which I like but which I know isn’t very good. On rereading it, it was much better than I remembered, so I decided that iffy poem was good after all.

I moved it to the main poetry folder and wondered about my judgment. Had I been too harsh before, or was I too forgiving now? A friend called just then to ask if I wanted to go out. We went to the bookstore to sip coffee, read snippets of books, and find fixes for the economy and the environment in magazines.

At the end of the evening, I returned to the poem and did some tweaking here and there. At first, the poem sounded just fine, save for a couple of awkward sentences and an odd turn of phrase. The more I worked on it, however, the more I found to fix, and the more serious the problems.
Though the need to fix added to the whole day-of-discouragement theme, I did feel vindicated about having judged the poem correctly the day I put it into the iffy folder.

By the time I finished with it last night, I felt fairly satisfied with what I’d done. It’s not a particularly good poem, a series of connected vignettes that build on one another to make a point that is neither original nor surprising, , but I like it because the poem reminds me of my work as a community college tutor, because the events in the poem happened all in one day exactly as described (pretty unusual), and because I’d like to honor the artistic rewards of that work and that student population.

I haven’t read the poem again today. I’m a little afraid I won’t like it. I’m trying to remind myself that books are made up of stronger poems and weaker ones. I’m also debating whether to start on the translation now or this evening, and I’m trying to decide how much time I should devote to that other poem.

Puntitas reads _The River Wife_ by J. Agee.

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.

Back to Normal

The last week and a half has been one of those up-and-down periods for me. One reason is that I’m finishing up my period, so the last ten days have been all about hormones, mood swings, and sweet-and-salty cravings. Beyond that, I’ve had some real stresses and some real joys.

Stressor 1: I accepted a freelance editing job, which I’m enjoying but which I charged waaaay too little for given that it is long (two manuscripts totaling 35,000 words).

Stressor 2: It’s taken me longer than expected to get the hang of my PDA. Forty-five pages into the first doc, I’m finally feeling some of that second-nature element with the device kicking in.

Stressor 3: Even though I’m making faster progress on the job, I’m still way behind schedule. My original goal was to finish both manuscripts by July 1, with the option of notifying my contact by June 15 if the second one would be delayed. I decided this weekend that I’ll have to contact him to give myself an extra month on the second doc.

Stressor 4: I realize I’ve got some manuscript deadlines coming up for my own work (poetry book contest postage dates), and I still have a couple of poems pending.

Stressor 5: Because of the state budget crisis and the Republican tendency to support big business and not much else, part-time teaching positions at my university will be scarce, so odds are, I won’t be doing much of that next year.
Stressor 6/Joy 1: I got the results of my interpreting exam, the one that involved exotic yoga positions as memory aids. I did not pass (surprise, surprise), but I did incredibly well given my horrendous performance. Each exam has eight or nine scoring areas. I passed at least six per exam, and most of my fails were borderline fails.

Joy 2: I decided to put more energy into posting pictures of my finished objects on my blog, and I bought more yarn to celebrate that decision.

Joy 3: Amid all the stress, someone lent me a nice relaxing book that made me laugh. It also put Janet Evanovich back into my good graces because I enjoyed the book and because I liked her comments on writing about ordinary heroes (made in an interview at the end of the recording). Note to self: avoid J. E.’s romance fiction at all cost.

Joy 4: Two friends and I took a trip to the beach over the weekend. We left Friday afternoon, returned Saturday night, and had a great time. I even met a knitting buddy.

Joy 5: I got some ideas for writing material, and I confirmed some other material I’ve already used.

I’m finally feeling myself again now that the hormones have leveled out. It helps that I’ve decided to delay the second editing manuscript in order to give myself time to work on my own stuff. For a change, I’m not at all bothered by the relative paucity of appointments (paying jobs) for the month of June.

Puntitas reads _Ten on Top_ by J. Evanovich.

The Mechanics

I’m having one of those brutal reminders of the importance of little things. I’ve taken a break from my manuscript in order to work on an editing job. I decided to do it on my PDA, not my desktop, partly to hone my PDA skills, but mostly to give myself the option of working somewhere other than at my desk.

While I’m enjoying the comfort of working from the plush recliner in my bedroom and while I’m looking forward to spending part of my day working on the patio, I’m feeling frustrated about the general slowness of the work. The work itself is not challenging. It’s a combination of basic research, a little imagination, and a lot of attention to detail. In and of itself, it’s coming along just fine. But after an hour or so of work, I check the time and am surprised to notice I’ve made so little progress.

I’ve used the PDA often enough and have become proficient enough that I can do most things without going to the help menu. I manage most features smoothly, but I still haven’t quite gotten some of the navigational things that make moving around the text a breeze. I have improved over even these last three days, but the work isn’t second nature, like it is on the desktop machine.

Part of me thinks that I would get more done if I were at the computer. Typing is so second nature to me that it feels like thinking, and using both Word and my screen reader is so comfortable that I’m hardly aware of either.

Like most people, I started by writing by hand. Since most things had to be typed eventually, I’d write a draft by hand, roll a sheet of paper to the platen, and revise as I went along. An avid note taker, I could write at a pace that matched my thinking for those days when I just had to get it out, but most of the time, I wrote at a slow to moderate pace, which gave me time to work out exactly what I needed to say. I rarely do that any more, but every now and then I find myself in a position where I have to reach for plain old paper. I wrote a couple of the poems in my manuscript that way. One even got published with minimal revision.

Then I wrote on the typewriter. As my typing speed and accuracy increased, I could focus less on the physical act of writing and concentrate more on the creative act of composing. While I was able to do that for certain relatively short, formulaic types of writing, it wasn’t something I could sustain for very long, though, thinking back on it now, it’s amazing that I could sustain it for as long as I did.

For a while, during one of my seriously blocked eras, I composed by speaking into a tape recorder. Then I typed or wrote it out by hand, in either case revising as I went along. That was great for certain things, and I was able to sustain the energy of a piece for much longer.

Eventually, I moved on to electronic devices. First it was the self-contained word processor, then WordPerfect in DOS, and now Word in XP. As I write this, I remember that the word processor printed on narrow cash register tape, so I had to type out the finished product those first few years. Even so, being able to delete, add, and move text around was such a wonderful, freeing experience (finally to say exactly what I wanted to say) that I first became unblocked, then became more blocked than ever.

With each new technology, I had to learn to write in a new way, not only to become competent at the mechanics but also to adjust the way I conceived and revised a piece of work. Lacking that second-nature fluency with the mechanics, as I am now with the PDA, is oddly disorienting even when competence is good.

For now, I’m going to keep plugging along with the PDA. Working in the comfy chair has been fabulous, something I don’t want to give up. I’ve have to run the file through Word when I’m done, partly to give it the last once-over, but partly to do a few things that my PDA may not be able to do. I’ll break the manual out next time I’m feeling patient and eager to learn.

Puntitas reads _Leonardo’s Swans_ by K. Essex.

Say It Again

I’m going to try working on a poem today. It’s current title is “My Dog Licks His Balls While the PCP Addict Next Door Talks to a Tree.” Yes, it’s a working title only, but I’m happy about it. I’ve had this poem in my head for about five years, and I even wrote a stanza out at one point, but the pieces didn’t come together as a poem until the night of the Komunyakaa reading. I think now that I didn’t have enough material then to make it a poem because the events didn’t play out until last year, but it’s my experience that writing is like that: a seed is planted in an idea or an image, and the writer must wait for recall or time to make a plant grow.

For the last three days, I’ve been down with a bad flu, so I’m not quite coherent. Today is that miraculous day of feeling significantly better, but despite a pleasant sense of psychological well being, I’m still physically exhausted, my desire to spend an hour on the treadmill overridden by dizzying fatigue after ten minutes of being on my feet. If I have a good night, I should be well enough to be back at work tomorrow. Naturally, I had appointments scheduled for today—none tomorrow. Así es la vida.

At any rate, my treatment plan has included liquids, antibiotics, sleep, and wonderfully mindless reading. The book I’m almost done with now has been surprising. I got it thinking it was one of those tame regency romances in which the female lead is a virgin until about three fourths of the way through the book, when she is deflowered by the male lead whom she loves and happily marries fifty to eighty pages later. Well, well, A Gentleman’s Wager has only one virgin, a secondary character, who loses her maidenhead to her dildo wielding best friend early on and drops all squeamishness about giving hand jobs by the middle of the book. There is so much sex, in fact, that the bed/stable/hallway/drawing room/… scenes in the last third of the book are omitted or abbreviated to keep them from losing their affect.

One sign of how incredibly ill I’ve been is that this last has been my literary revelation of the moment. I think I really understood that unescalating repetition, especially of intense events or emotions, weakens affect, when I went to a showing of the movie A Mighty Heart, about the disappearance and murder of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl. It’s actually the story of his pregnant wife’s experience during that ordeal. He goes missing near the beginning of the film. She contacts the right people to search and later investigate the disappearance and has three or four screaming fits throughout the movie to get it started or keep it moving. When she finds out he’s been beheaded on film, she breaks down into an agony of sobs that is painful to sit through. She refuses to watch the tape until the very end of the movie. When she does, she breaks into similar wails of grief. While I can’t even begin to imagine how horrible that moment must have been for the widow, I did notice that for myself, as an audience member, the second intense emotional outburst was far less moving, because I’d already experienced the smaller ones connected to the investigation and because the first one over the news of his death, was so big. The director seems to have anticipated such a response because he kept the second outburst short and used it to lead into her labor and delivery. But my own sense is that the scenes would have been more effective, from a craft standpoint, if there had been fewer little outbursts, if the first outburst had been kept small, and if the second had been allowed to grow bigger.

I thought of that a few days ago while reading The Haunting of Hill House. The book is not only different from any of the movie versions I know of but much creepier as well. Four people spend some time in a house known to be haunted. Most paranormal manifestations happen at night, and while they do not happen every night, they do escalate each time they occur. After about a week, two more people come to the house. The first paranormal manifestation happens again. Affect isn’t weakened for several reasons: (1) characters acknowledge that this is a repetition; (2) characters react differently to the phenomena, so the reader is able to gauge how much they’ve changed; (3) the addition of the new characters, who don’t experience the phenomena, provides added information about whence the paranormal force draws its power. The manifestation happens again one or two nights later, but it doesn’t produce a sensation of repetitiveness because it is an escalation of itself: it is produced by one of the inhabitants, who has now absorbed the spirit of the house.

All of this was clear to me, but it didn’t quite click until I noticed that the sex scenes near the end of my trashy novel of the moment were shorter the further I read. The first time a scene was truncated, I thought, “What, no straddling of the hips after a round of oral stimulation?” Those words had no sooner crossed my mind than I realized that there was no point in putting it on the page since I knew it was cumming.

Puntitas reads _What Was She Thinking: Notes on a Scandal_ by Z. Heller and _A Gentleman’s Wager_ by M. Ellis.

Catching a Spark

Avoidance seems to work for me. Last night, I thought the weekend would be about Ursula and her knitting, but today that seemed too hard to think through, so I pulled up a poem that was almost done last time we met.

Again, who picked out the brilliance to leave all the crap?

I wrote it the semester I took a class on form. The only real rule on this one is seven syllables to the line. As with the sonnet, I noticed a lot of flab (irrelevant detail, needless repetition, pacing issues). I was going for a feeling of frantic chaos that encircles a core of overwhelming isolation.

Emotionally, the poem is successful, but on a literal level the action is hard to follow. The language is vague; the images develop the mood, not the actual situation; and the lack of substance weakens the impact of the close.

The second I stopped reading, I started to revise. First it was fairly superficial stuff, cutting flabby words to fuse lines, but quickly I discovered I was adding detail, filling out the story of the poem, giving it the life of setting and of character motivation. The biggest thing is that I rediscovered it’s about the significance of losing a poem that wrote itself. I remember starting with that idea, but somewhere along the way, I lost it.

The changes go into the major overhaul category: whole stanzas will disappear to be replaced by others, and new characters and a new sense of what is missing will be added.

What does work well in the version of the poem as it stands is the use of nonflab related repetition. A few of the images and lines come up two or three times, evoking some of the circular unease of a villanelle. I’ll try to keep that aspect of the poem. I’m excited.