This morning I got an email from a friend who compared reading Tracing Paradise to reading a travel narrative, which struck me as comic since the book is all about staying in one dull place. Of course, he has a point . . . traveling through Milton is like traveling through awareness, etc. Still, I wasn't focused at all on that theme as I constructed the book.

When I'm writing an essay, I always think that I'm thinking. But later somebody else generally notices points about the piece that never occurred to me. Scholars can make entire careers out of finding literary synchronicities that the authors never pay any attention to creating. 

When I'm writing a poem, I rarely think that I'm thinking. The experience is, initially, far more like drunkenly transcribing what happens at a particular intersection of emotion, sensory awareness, and memory. Sometimes it really does feel like that moment in the movie Amadeus when Mozart just pulls the Requiem out of the air. And then, with a cooler head and a more purposeful focus on drama (by which I mean frame and suspense and sentence control), I revise and revise and revise and revise, ad infinitum.

Probably I've posted all this stuff before, but they interest me, these varied ways in which the mind needs to function in order to create different kinds of art at different points in the process.

Time to go out into the dripping world and feed those screeching goats and chickens and fill the gaping woodbox. There will be only screeching brakes in Brooklyn. But they are just as difficult to ignore.