You're Only Cheating Yourself?

The point of the 30/30, for me, I must remind myself, is to produce work toward my dissertation. Yet, today, repurposing or appropriating my own, previous work--revised through a new lens, new light, new project--feels like cheating. Why? I don't know. Something about a mentor telling me I always need to keep working toward the next, better poem (emphasis on--in my mind--next being better).

Though now that I'm working on a second collection, having--I feel 97.2% sure--finished the first, it's becoming clear that some of those older poems that were pulled from Errata or just never made it in weren't necessarily poems meant for the junk; they were poems waiting for their place.

Why I had a hard time recognizing that makes me feel a bit like a dolt. I do this with lines or images all the time. My students always seem so shocked--what?! you carried around that line or image for how many years?! Until it fits, of course, you sillyninnymuggins. Maybe they think it makes me less of an artist or that it just makes me slow to chew so long on an idea. I've always tried to impress upon them the earnestness of the journey, and that in writing--or essaying (in prose or in poetry)--the truest answers come from the questions we mull for more than the night prior to the assignment deadline. What?! Yes, kids, shocker, I know. Then, that's the difference, I suppose, between the student and the writer--or the human who has accepted that he/she has no choice but to follow to its end or its meandering the compulsion to keep unearthing the dirt, knowing light might never again present itself. Just to smell the earth against your skin. Or some shit. Now I'm all off track.

Anyway, Day Six is a repurposed, revised, re-appropriated tiny love poem, if you will, from Po to Astro.

Aaaand I Googled myself again. What?!--you fucking do it, too, admit it! Anyway, I did it this time for a rather specific reason and came across this review of Ecotone in which reviewer Anne Graue has some things to say about my Astro-Po poems. Interesting to read what she has to say and to stumble upon this now as I'm immersing myself in the lives of these two, which--of course--is really this one, but as my friend Traci Brimhall has reminded me, I am "the bread and the knife." Indeed. Thanks, Traci. & Billy. & this ridiculously amazing tiny person.

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