Poetry beta testers?

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First, feel free to ignore this post. Seriously. You’ll see why in a second.

I recently made a decision about my life – if you read the blog entry entitled “More lullaby, less pit,” you know what I’m talking about. One of the things this has translated into is that I want to get this alleged book of poetry I’ve been working on since the last time I lived in NC together and submit it to some publishers. There’s big money to be made in poetry, after all.

Before I do that, I want to go through a bit of beta testing, and am looking for some folks who have the time and self-loathing required to wade through 70+ pages of verse. See now why I said what I did in the first line above?

Okay, for some reason you’re still with me. If you’re interested, what I’d do is let you download the manuscript and have at it. I’m thinking that I’m close to being ready on it, but I know there are some things that aren’t quite right yet. In fact, I think I know what some of those things are, but I occasionally wait to hear if somebody else says it just to make sure, you know?

In addition to any comments you’d have on the individual poems, I’d be curious as to what you think about:

  • the overall structure and concept
  • arrangement of sections
  • arrangement of pieces in the sections
  • thematic unity (some poems don’t belong in the same book with others, and there may be some here that aren’t quite right for the pieces around them)
  • flow
  • unevenness and consistency (not all poems are as good as your best work, but there’s a trick to knowing whether poem A is simply not as good as poem B or whether it is instead worse enough that it compromises the rest of a section or an entire book; there are poems in here that I wonder this about)
  • etc.

I fully expect most readers to quickly find themselves here:

“I don’t understand what this is trying to say.”

Which is fine. Sometimes I’m not sure I’m trying to say, either. I remember a colleague who once said of Charles Wright, “I don’t know what this means, but I feel something.” Right. It matters not to me whether you can intellectually dissect all the high-fallutin’ references. It matters how you find yourself relating to it despite the occasional moments of mental confusion. Heck, I have no idea what Monet’s Water Lillies means, but I love it beyond all other works of art. So for me, meaning isn’t always about thinking. Sometimes things mean powerfully for reasons we can’t begin to explain.

So I’d merely ask you to trust yourself and offer whatever comments make sense to you, and in whatever language makes sense.

If you feel the call, let me know. If not, I promise that I understand. In fact, you don’t even need to bother writing to explain or apologize. I’m serious when I say that if four people volunteer I’ll be ecstatic….

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