It's too early to be awake on a Saturday morning, but nonetheless I am on the couch and drinking coffee and listening to snowmelt drip off the roof. We are supposed to get up to two inches of rain tonight, and I expect Portland to be a mess of flooded slop by this time tomorrow. For the moment, though, there's just this ticking drip, drip; the growl of an airplane overhead; the mutter of my own breath.

Yesterday I submitted the embryo manuscript to a publisher, who also asked me to include a brief description of what I thought was going on in the collection--not a blurb but a statement of intent. I appreciated that question; I don't think any press has asked me that before.

Here's what I ended up writing:

I think of this manuscript as a poetic version of a linked short-story collection. The viewpoint shifts from a speaking "I" to omniscience; from past to present; from memoir to invention. But the collection as a whole maintains fidelity to the complex notion of blood, which may connote history and family, but also life force and violence, inheritance and loss. Through both narrative and lyric means, I pushed myself to address these conundrums: to see, to admit, to mourn.

When I reread the note, I see that it depends too much on rhetorical pacing. Nonetheless, I'm glad I was forced to put into words the impulses that arose as I ordered and re-ordered these poems.

Creating a manuscript can be difficult, but also mutable. Both Chestnut Ridge and the unpublished A Month in Summer were driven by outside forces: in one case, chronology; in the other, narrative. Those parameters created their own complications, but poem order was fairly obvious. This current manuscript, composed of a decade's-worth of poems, pulls together pieces that arrived as single works, not as elements of a larger project. What do they mean to one another? How do they speak as a unit? It's very hard to figure that out.

When organizing my first three collections, I went through a similar struggle with order. But in some ways, because I had fewer pieces to work with at that time, I also had more obvious options. By this point in my life, I have so many poems that I can't use them all in a manuscript. In fact, I'm leaving out many that have already been published in journals. They're not bad poems: they just don't fit; they don't make sense in this context; they're the wrong weight or tone. This kind of decision making is really hard.

Well, we'll see what transpires. Very possibly nothing. Getting published does not get easier, at least not for me. I'm not "emerging"; I'm not famous. I've got a stack of books that don't sell and that no one reviews. But don't think of this as complaining: truly, I'm far more successful than I ever thought I'd be. I write because I have to write, and a lot of what I've written has been printed. That's a miracle, for a not-famous person. Still, the process of trying to get people to pay attention to new work . . . it's hard, and often painful and demoralizing.

Anyway: in cheery news (cheery to me, anyway), the next issue of the Beloit Poetry Journal is going to include not only the first section of A Month in Summer but also my essay-review of recent collections by two other not-famous poets. Beloit has rejected a lot of my submissions over the past few years, so I'm especially pleased they took this longish excerpt. And I'm glad to be celebrating some other semi-invisibles who are persevering.