For months now I have been wrestling with my western Pennsylvania manuscript--organizing, reorganizing; inserting, deleting; breaking it into sections and different sections and different sections. Nothing has been right; nothing has worked. As a group, the poems are unwieldy, disjointed, clumsy; and trying to collect them into any kind of order has been an exercise in despair.

It is hard to give up on a project that has been so vital to me. But last week, I admitted to myself that these poems cannot all be in the same book. I sat at the kitchen table, staring at the stacks, and thought, What's next?

And then I thought of my chapbook manuscript, Vocation, the one that was a prize finalist earlier this year. I took it out of storage and looked through it. My organization strategy had been to alternate several Pennsylvania and non-Pennsylvania poems, following a thematic thread of work in all of its ambiguities--joy, desperation, weariness, illness, destruction, and so on. Since putting together that chapbook, I'd written a number of other non-Pennsylvania poems. So using the chapbook as a template, I began creating a longer version of that original alternating manuscript. Now I began to understand that common subject matter was crossing back and forth among both kinds of poems, despite their historical separations: music, violence, baseball, obsession, time. I began to see a book.

The upshot: I have a new poetry collection, one that I am ready to ask my publisher to read. And if any of you are interested in being thoughtful early critics of its content and order, I would be happy and grateful.