Monday, July 16, 2007

Poetry Manuscripts

I’ve been attempting to put together a manuscript of poems for an as yet mythical future collection. My first attempt to sort my poems out into ‘possibles’ and ‘rejects’ yielded 97 possibles (the rejects, including several poems I’ve published in magazines [euch!], numbered far more than that – these don’t include other poems that didn’t even make the rejects’ cut, and I haven’t selected any poems from my chapbook).

Since then, I’ve got it down to 59, but I’ll have to cut further. It’s quite hard when it gets to this stage. It’s all gut reaction. I cross out poems without thinking too hard about why. But I might be making all the wrong decisions.