Goofing Off

Inspired by Steve, I was curious to see where I stood with MS #2.   Culling out the poems from Ice Sculpture leaves me with 225 poems that survived several working culls.  Some poems in that batch could have fit within Ice - indeed, speak more clearly to my themes than I thought when I was first assembling the MS which became Ice.  Ah well.  I have to trust that I knew what I was doing and that I'd find them as not fitting into the MS in some way (plus I have to trust all my readers who axed poems).

Some of the poems in that non-Ice file I'd never publish now.  Others I think are fine, but are not really doing *enough* for me in terms of sound and substance; I wouldn't be embarrassed if they showed up, but I wouldn't send them out either.  I could probably find a small corpus of poems ready to go.  Perhaps I should begin sending them out for periodical publication.  But that invovles stamps.  And typing.  And printing.  And all that jazz.  And I'm such an ambivalent and lazy guy re: publication.  Still. . .

It's been an enjoyable (if largely brainless) exercise of cutting and pasting and using Word's "replace" function.  Perhaps while I'm in the mood I should try to come up with a "send 'em out" MS based on individual poem selection, never mind if they'd all hold together in a book. Hmm. Well, it's either that or a bad sci-fi rental for the evening.  Such is the pointlessness of my days when Lyco is not in town.

More Goofing Off (Addendum to post):

Well, after sorting through my poems, I currently clock in at 319 not-too-embarrassing poems. 

80 of those 319 poems will be coming out in Ice Sculpture of Mermaid With Cigar (and I hope we’ve all selected from the top 1/3rd in the poems in my list.)

My records show 149 poems (of the 319) as being published in one combination or another, including Ice.  Some (19) will have periodic publication, republication, chapbook appearance then appear in Ice – however that kind of thing still just counts as one published poem out of the 149.  In fact, one poem (The Peace Bell) went periodic, anthology, republication, chapbook, Ice Sculpture.

That leaves 169 poems ready to go.  Sorta.  Some of them clearly aren’t going to go anywhere.  In fact, about half of them are not going to be sent out.  A quick sort through them shows about 90 or so that I *might* be willing to send out.  However, I suspect a good number of those are pieces that would work best in light of other poems (or a short series).  I have a few good stand-alone poems in that bunch.

Part of that sorting/updating process I went through (I use a big excell file and several word documents to hold groupings of the poems themselves) was to generate a list of titles, which I thought was pretty neat.  So I've included them here for the curious. 

Titles:

3AM; 4:30PM, 93 degrees, 89% humidity; A Friend Goes Bad, Gets Caught; A Hawk Behind Phillips Memorial Library; A House Wherein I Loved a Woman; A Man's Response to Unconditional Love; A Poem to What the Body Remembers; About the Author; Adrenal; After Reading Chinese Poetry for Three Hours; After the Epiphany; Aggies and Innies; Air War: Before Parachutes, 1917; Air War: Code; Air War: Knights of the Air; Air War: Section Y: Interception Service; Air War: Temporary Mortuary; Air War: What You Make; Am - Was; Ambage; An Hour Before the Polls Close; An Old Man Donates 22 Boxes of Books to the Public Library; An Old Scarf; Anchor Ice; Angel Hernandez is Late for my Poetry Class; Another; Aquinas Burning; Archeology; Asked to Participate in a Study on Rhythm and Concurrent Sound in Poety; Bah-Dah-Ha. . .Da-Na-Ha-Da; Belle; Belts it out; Benchmark; Blue Sestina; Broken Down at Martinez y Martinez; Buckaroo Bonsai; Buddha; Building Bird’s Nests; Capillary Action; Cardinal; Causes of Death In London, 1632; Çedilla; Census in Rural Georgia; Chance; Chaos Theory and the Knuckleballer; Clawfoot; Cleaning my Inherited Pots; Clearances: Allegory; Clearances: Converts to the Free Church of Scotland; Clearances: Isle of Eigg; Collaboration Empties; Come Close; Connecticut Subdivisions; Courting the Musician; Creatures of Earth; Cry-up; Danse of the Bag Boy; Dashboard Hula in Fourth Gear; Dear Mike,; Dec 17th 1998; Deer Loose in Crispino’s Market Put Down by Animal Control; Dinner with a Former Lover; Discovering her Poems not "Strictly Autobiographical"; Doing My Laundry Alone; Dyslexia; Eastern Connecticut, 1774; Eddy's Laundry; Ekphrasis; Elegy for Bob Ross; Elegy for Pelaghia; Embarrassed by the Old Poems; Empty Bed, Best Town; Entering the Clock; Entire Body Writes; Epiphytic Plant Exhibit at the Georgia Botanical Garden; Exactly How Far You’ve Come Down the Path of Enlightenment; Excerpts from the Journal of a Medical Examiner; Expedient Mechanics; Explain What I Hear in Paul Westerberg’s Voice?; f&-'ne-tiks; False Spring; Famine Meal; Fifth Christmas; Fireworks; First Snowfall in Maine; Fishing (for Hart Crane); Fixin’ Tanks in Texas; Fixing my Raleigh; Flea Market Collectors; For B.; For Brother Dennis in Aegypt; For Hannah; For Jeoffry: Five Fingered “Boston Cats”; For Jeoffry: The Cat and I Stalk; For Jeoffry: Your Cat Gives You. . .; For K; For Those I’ve Left in the Twentieth Century; Forgetting My Dead Brother; Forsaken; Four Views of the Musician’s Fingers; Funeral Shoes; Georgian August Hailstorm Alba; Getting Drunk and Failing to Write a Blues; Girl on a Bike; Glasgow; Glue Factory; Goddard’s Rocket; Going Insane; Great Molasses Flood; Grind; Habit; Having Nothing Better To Do, I Bicycle Through My Home Town; He Dislikes the Tools of His Trade; Hemingway’s Letterdesk; Homage to an Unnamed Surrealist.; Homage to Ezra; Home. Sick.; Homo Ferus; How the Guitar is Tuned; How To Move For Love; Hymnal Week; I Burn the Love Letters; I Dust Off my Funeral Shoes; Ice Sculpture of Mermaid with Cigar; Imagining Myself as Myself; Inbound; It's OK to Win; J.R.R. Tolkien in the Twentieth Century: at the Somme, 1916; J.R.R. Tolkien in the Twentieth Century: September, 1932; J.R.R. Tolkien in the Twentieth Century: With Ava Gardner, Oxford, Nov. 1965; January Kissing in the Derelict Church; Jar of Buttons; July 6, 1944, Hartford; Jumping Bones; Junkshops; Keepsake; Ken Fearing; Kitchen Sink Devotional; Lahar; Lingual; Listening to the NEA Poet, the Famous Prize Winner, at the Local University; Losing a Neighbor; Lullaby for Righty; Magician’s Assistant; Man Speaking; March Nor’easter; Marigolds; Matches; Metaphysics; Middle School Concert; Migrant Workers' Illegal Children; Mike Plays The Custom House; Mile Zero; Minnehosquett Public Park, Cycling in a Heat Wave; Minutiae; Mirror; Misanthrope; Model Train Set; Morning Dove; Morning meditation, untitled; Musician’s Aubade; My Benediction; My Grandmother, Deep in Alzheimer’s; New England, December 1995; Newport: The Lepers Play Volleyball; News; Nocturne; Not Striking the Right Attitude; November; Nu sculon herian  heofon-rices Weard; October 11th, 2002; Omega; On Being Enjoined to Review a Popular Poet with no Ear but Lauded Intellect; On Hearing Louise G. Speculate, War is Men’s Version of Dressing Up; On Seeing the Trade Towers; Open; Opening the Window; Painter; Painting Speech; Pants; Paper-route: Snowstorm; Payne Stuart, Oct. 25th 1999; Peace Bell; Platform; Playing Woody Guthrie’s Guitar; Poems on Poetry; Postcard from Upstairs; Practicalities; Praise; Prayer for Emily; Press Gang; Pressing Flesh; Rapist at 87; Raptors; Reading a Latin Bestiary; Reading Confucius in the Sun; Reading Paradise Lost; Recovering Surrealist; Remission Confirmed; Repotting Your Jade Shoot; Resolved To No Longer Believe in Signs or Omens; Reviewing, by request, Poems Today: a web-anthology of provocative poems of love and loss and harmony (some in German); Riddle; Riddle Sequence; Ring of Dead Keys; RJ Is; Root Cellar After Flood; Rufful's Diner; Schoolchildren in the Kriminalmuseum; She Plays It For Someone Else; Shopping at the Walt Whitman Mall, N.J.; Sick of wishing; Sidewalk Surfin Girl; Silent Director; Six Months Before his Death, H.P. Lovecraft Climbs College Hill, 1936.; Six Years For Jude; Sleep; Sleeping In A House Wherein I Am A Burden; Small House, Seaside; Small Talk; Small Town Newspaper; Snail Shell; So Many Reasons To Not Write Poetry; Someone Does It Better; Sometimes It’s Like This; Sonnet Becoming; Soup; Sperm Donation; Spinning Devil; Spring; St. Elizabeth's; Stealing my Thesis from the Sarah Lawrence Library; Sticky; Stricture; Suicide-Prevention Clinic; Sunday Meditation; Sunday Ritual; Surf Beach; Suzie Visits Dr. Shupe; Swimmer Off Watch Hill; Tag Sales; Telos Aubade; That on which the Movies were Played; The Angel of Sleep; The Clerk in the Porn Store; The Corpse Flower; The Diminished; The Generation After the Bomb Drills Were Discontinued:; The Great Molasses Flood; The Greening; The Hartford Museum of Natural and Other Curiosities; The Hymnal Week Friday; The Hymnal Week Monday; The Hymnal Week Saturday; The Hymnal Week Sunday; The Hymnal Week Thursday; The Hymnal Week Tuesday; The Hymnal Week Wednesday; The I and the You; The Imagined Readership; The Insomniac Falls for the Narcoleptic; The Kisses; The Long Ride; The Magician’s Assistant; The man on the far end; The Maze Should Be Arranged; The Migrant Workers’ Illegal Children; The Musician Deals the Cards and Bids; The Musician Gets Drunk and Sings Me to Sleep; The Musician Plays it Strong; The Musician Reads Tarot and Talks Seriously; The Musician Sets a Poem to Music; The Musician's Socialist Love Song; The Omega; The Peace Bell; The Raptors; The Real Bird in The Diorama Of Birds; The Rhapsodic Concave Heart; The Silent Director; The Sock Puppeteer; The Trombone Player; The Warm Ash; The Words Go Wrong; Theodore Samuel Williams, 72, Attends his First Spring Training Game in a Decade; They Leap; Thinking I’ve Left the House, My Father Plays His Records; This Book in Human Skin; Thomas Paine and the Iron Bridge; Three Months Without My Man; Three Poems; Tiger Lilly Arms; To a Contemporary Poet; To My Dresser; To My Former Protégé; Too Early, Too Late; Trampoline; Tree that Owns Itself; Trying Not to Fall in Love; Two Summers Begin; Utility; Visiting my Grandmother Before Surgery; Vonósnégyes (String Quartet); Wanting; Washing Your Hair; Watching a Former Lover Make Tea; Water From Tar; Weeding; Welding Drunk; What to Read in America?; Whiskey Pantoum; Winter Riveting on the Clyde: Govan, Scotland; Wordless, Swirling; Worst Riddle; You Have Heard My Silent Body; Your Scent; Yucatan Dig.