Progress Notes

I have thirty-nine pages (22 poems) of hummingbird material, all of which comes together fairly well into a manuscript concerning the work of Martin Johnson Heade. I also have 28 pages (18 poems) that are overtly unrelated to the Heade poems.

I am trying to decide what to do with all of this. I'd like to mail some submissions over the New Year's weekend, which will prompt me to focus this week--revising, polishing, thinking seriously about good homes for what I have so far.

The first write-through of my new manuscript is nearing completion. This is the first time I have attempted to write something "themed" from the outset. In earlier manuscripts, I simply wrote a bunch of poems and then looked through them for a thread around which to gather the collection. That seemed clear enough as an approach.

Anyway, I thought this project was fairly straightforward, but I gave a copy of the Heade materials to my daughter Hannah, who is preternaturally clever. After reading it, she pronounced herself baffled. Exactly what is (was) my little point? Obsession? Failure? I feel as if I have one--if not several such points, but if that isn't coming across...

Still though, alas, I invoke these almost deadly birds of the soul.