Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Polishing Book 2: Gonesongs

More from me in a week or two - right now I'm concentrating on polishing Book 2, which will be my creative thesis for the MFA. It's a whole lot different than God in my Throat - more autobiographical and more personal narrative, which makes me a bit more raw when working on it. The working title for it is Gonesongs, though I'm not sure if I'm in love with that. I've got another title percolating, but the poem that includes the title line isn't actually written yet. Working on that, and if it gets written - and fits into the collection - I'll let you know.


Anyway, I've been extremely lucky. I requested poetess Jeanie Thompson as my mentor (if you've been following this blog, you know that she was actually my mentor for my first semester in the program), and happy of happies, I got her. Her first run-through of the manuscript culled a lot of extraneous junk and unnecessaries, and included some commentary that give me a much better idea of how the manuscript stands on its own. It's sort of like the book was a slab of marble with a good sculpture inside, and she managed to carve something worthy out of it. All to say, it's already far better after her first run-through of the manuscript, even though there are a few major rewrites and revisions for me to get done in short order.