As I mentioned earlier this week, the new poetry manuscript I'll be submitting to my publisher includes a sheaf of western Pennsylvania poems, many of which were triggered by historical anecdotes and include details or language from those sources. So I spent much of yesterday typing out a list of source notes to include with the manuscript . . . though I do always wonder: does anybody other than me care about citations in a work of fiction?

I'm always very interested in finding out where a writer's ideas come from, but at the same time I understand that those sources aren't necessarily central to the imaginative essence of the poem or the novel. Peter Mathiessen's Shadow Country may circle an actual series of events, but the beauty and intensity of that book arise from the way in which the writer elaborated on the facts. Likewise, Ford Madox Ford's trilogy The Fifth Queen, a gorgeous and tragic evocation of the marriage of Henry VIII and Katherine Howard,  is more or less a complete lie, though the characters did exist as historical figures. Ford did not feel the need to include a list of "books I have read about the Tudors" at the end of his trilogy: but to tell the truth, I wish he had included a list so that I could search them out and read what he was reading in the months before his novels came to life, when the ideas were still fermenting in his mind.