Post 4th

Rough 4th of July. Basically my 3-yr-old had a low-grade fever all day and let everyone know he wasn't feeling good. So there was a lot of crying and a lot of hugging. Had to cancel all our plans, but that's parenthood, eh?

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I finished up the acknowledgments page for A Face to Meet the Faces. It's quite an impressive list! Among the notables, Cornelius Eady, Ilya Kaminsky, Barbara Jane Reyes, Annie Finch, Terry Hummer, Major Jackson, Kazim Ali, Brian Turner. Still, I'm ready to be finished with this project as I know Stacey is too. There are a few more odds and ends to see to, but it'll get done.

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Speeding along with my writing commitment. I'm trying to pace my writing a bit. I feel like I could sit down and write a few poems per setting, but I want to draw this out a bit. My short term goals--to print out all the "Dear Empire" poems and shuffle them into some kind of order by the end of the month. My long term goals--to start working on a different project.

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I'm jumping between prose poems and lineated poems because it's disconcerting and I'm trying to understand how I write both. I'm not sure the last sentence I wrote makes much sense to you, but it makes plenty of sense to me. Everytime I write a poem, I feel like I'm relearning my process. Something in my writing ritual consistently attempts to reengage part of a poetic practice that instigated a previous poem. Ultimately, each poem I write is a failed attempt at reproducing a prior practice. But out of those failures come discoveries. As a former scientist, that part of my writing life is very similar to my life as a biologist living with the code of the scientific method.

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Current Spin: