A glance back at my recent posts proves that a poet at work may be one of the most boring people in existence. No doubt I've lost most of my eight readers during the past several days. I am sorry for feeding you so many bland and tedious sentences, but truly they were the best I could manage. The words were all funneled elsewhere.

Yesterday I revised and revised, and for now, at least, the poem is done. If I tell you that it feels like a masterpiece, I hope you will understand that what I mean is that it feels like a masterpiece in my own struggle to write. I wrote things in this poem that I have never written before (and none of it is prurient or victim-ridden, which I hope will be a relief to all). Maybe what I mean to say is that I managed to connect things (ah, that vague word things), tie them together, conceive of them as a dramatic unity in ways that I have never yet been able to do. If anything, my diction is starker than usual, though the time frame and the setting are broad and fluid. The poem is a narrative but it is also an examination. I may hate it next week, but for now I am amazed and relieved and exhausted and lonely without it.

Now I need to turn my attention to writing more interesting letters to you. I am sorry I have been so dull. Forgive me.