My National Poetry Month Project: Cutting the Draft
*poof!*
posted by greg rappleye at 2:03 PM
Sunday, April 22, 2007
About Me
- Name: greg rappleye
- Location: Grand Haven, Michigan, United States
I am a writer who lives and works in West Michigan. I am a graduate of Albion College, the University of Michigan Law School, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. I have published three full-length collections of poetry: Holding Down the Earth (Sky Books, 1995), A Path Between Houses (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000) which won the Brittingham Prize, and Figured Dark (University of Arkansas Press, 2007), which won the University of Arkansas Press Poetry Series. I have also published three chapbooks: Eros, Psyche and the Death of Narrative (Candle Creek Press, 2006), The Afterlight (WVU-Legal Studies Forum, 2006), and The Divisible Field ( WVU-Legal Studies Forum, 2008), and have completed a fourth manuscript, Tropical Landscape with Ten Hummingbirds. I am working on a novel. My work has received a Pushcart Prize, the Mississippi Review Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Prize, the Greensboro Review Literary Award in Poetry, and the Arts & Letters Prize. I was a Bread Loaf Fellow in 2002. When not writing, I work full-time as corporation counsel for a local government and also teach part-time in the English Department at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
Previous Posts
- Sunday Morning, with Cooper's Hawk
- My National Poetry Month Writing Project--DRAFT
- A Moment with Stan Rice
- Yes, This Actually Happened
- Seven of the Five Books of Poetry I Wish I Owned a...
- Reading in Grand Rapids
- A Black Day in the Blue Ridge
- After Blacksburg, I am Without Words
- Blinded by the Light
- A Few More Minutes Before the Cold
4 Comments:
I see three sections. .. do you even want feedback? well, in either case great stuff! something to walk around with. . .
Miguel:
Yes--Feedback is good.
I could see three sections.
This is by no means finished.
Thanks!
I hope all is well.
Wow, what a poem! I am really in awe, Greg. But ... you took out so much stuff between the two drafts! I think you went too far! You took out those amazing lines about the dogs and "the faces of the blind taste good." You took out the chicken shacks and the video stores and the semi and Orpheus and the rhododendrons and ... OK, some people might say that I go too far in my own poems and include too much, but I really loved some of that stuff in the earlier draft--not that it's not still a great poem. Some of the revisions are great too, e.g. "star-wild" to "star-smeared." I wasn't sure, though, if you really meant to change "cursing" the sea bed to "crossing" it. "Cursing" seemed to make more sense (for the Egyptians). In any case, those images of what the army might have seen in the parted sea are spectacular.
Robert:
Yes, I think you are right. I went back and read the earllier draft and am reposting a re-built model.
I never did mean to write "cursing the miraculous sea bed" --in fact, I didn't know I had until you pointed it out.
You're right though, "cursing" is a lot better.
Thanks!
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