Yesterday, as I was writing a letter to a friend about prose poems (i.e., "how do you make them? by sentence cadence? by story line? what are they? why aren't they called little essays?"), I realized that within the past couple of weeks I have written ten new western Pennsylvania poems, all varying wildly in terms of structure and sound, many varying wildly in terms of time and subject:

1635 (geography, flora, indigenous tribes, and early European encroachment)
1717 (the Scots-Irish invasion of the backcountry)
1786 (old farts talking about the Whiskey Rebellion)
1887 (whist-playing industrialists)
1891 (Johnstown Flood)
1914 (movie censorship)
1935 (Fallingwater and anti-Semitism)
1937 (media, advertising, technology, Hindenberg)
1982 (women in the military)
2003 (the stuff at the Donegal exit of the Pennsylvania Turnpike)

As usual when I am in the zone, I am suspicious of the relative ease with which I have written these pieces. ("If I've written so much stuff so fast, it must suck, right?") In addition, I am deeply unsure of the strangeness of their structure. ("How can I, the poetic reactionary, be writing poems in newspaper columns and double voices and slogans and un-musical chunks?") I know I am sounding coy and tragicomic here, and on a certain level I agree that I am mythologizing my conservative reading and writing styles for the sake of enacting the role of a sprightly correspondent who is searching for material to share with her friends at 7 a.m. on a snowy Wednesday morning. But beneath the coyness, I am startled and disturbed by this hairpin turn in my artistic life.

What is also interesting is that I am far more shocked than I was three years ago, when I first began working on these poems. Those early pieces also demanded their own individual structures, but often the demands were metrical and rhymed. Now those staid drafts have been woven into the fabric of chaos.

It's clear to me that I'm working out a way to construct a replica of life and time: I see, I hear, I understand what is going on here. I'm doing what I should be doing. But I'm still appalled at the way in which creation re-creates the creator. Appalled, it seems to me, is not too strong a word. Wasn't Moses appalled by the burning bush?