Quick Post after Lunch with S and Dad, Before Our Walk with the Dogs

I'm thinking more about the width and bulk of my recent poems. Part of the impetus for writing these poems was a long fascination with some of Larry Levis's poems and the muscular poems of David Dominguez, and in the last couple of weeks as I have been drafting them, I just decided to write freely and then work with the enjambment later. I also remember reading Gerald Stern's book Odd Mercy, which I bought when I was in Iowa about ten years ago, and I was fascinated with the scope of his poem "Hot Dog." So in this case, it's almost like an exercise in freewriting that has turned into a series of poems. I am going to ride it out and see how far it takes me, these new wide poems. Maybe I will even send some out to journals, which I've been neglecting for a while now. I've become more of a reader of my friends' work lately, as I am reading several manuscripts and a play by a colleague. But this freewriting will hopefully lead to something. I've thought I should spend as much time writing/drafting poems as I do reading Facebook, which has become far too time consuming these days. There are short trips planned in the coming months, but I have absolutely no excuses to get writing. My writing group will hopefully commence this summer, and I have been invited to join another one this summer, too. I want to keep busy with these activities, but I want to write. It's been a long year of not too much quality writing, and of the poems I wrote on my sabbatical last year, I'd say there are maybe twenty or twenty-five that are manuscript worthy. I laid out a rough table of contents the other day, and I think I have maybe thirty or thirty-five poems toward the second book. That's not all bad, now that I think about it. The title I have in my head now is : A Brand New Acoustic.

*

Here is a live video of Led Zeppelin' "Hot Dog," 1979.