The weather is every bad thing I feared it would be. Even here in balmy Portland, we've got sleet mixed with rain, and driving north will be a nightmare of ice and snow. I've got till midday to decide, but the answer seems clear.

So instead of jaunting up to the muddy homeland, I guess I'll be tucked up next to a wood fire in the cozy diaspora. A disappointment, but a comfortable one.

And I'll have an unexpected storm day to myself. So, more reading and writing, a bit of editing. Maybe I'll go out to the salon in the evening . . . anything could happen.

I've been thinking about the comment that Nancy left on yesterday's post, the one in which she expressed interest in seeing poem drafts. I don't customarily save drafts. My general habit has been to compose directly on the computer and then revise and experiment within the document rather than print out or file multiple versions. Other people are different in this regard: my friend Teresa says she keeps long trails of drafts. But I've got an aversion to clutter, even on my computer, and I revise best if I keep a clean page.

More recently, however, I've been composing first drafts in longhand. This shift has come about because I've been leading generative writing sessions and also writing in community at the salon, and the notebook has been a more useful tool in those situations. I don't call these blurts first drafts but pre-poems: they tend to have sloppy or nonexistent lineation, be filled with stutter-starts and off-ramps, and veer wildly into tragedy or farce. But they're interesting to me nonetheless, and all winter long I've been able to mine these notebook scrawls for material for true first drafts, which in my personal definition are early iterations of actual, coherent, beginning-to-end poems.

So yesterday, after I read Nancy's comment, I typed out the notebook entry verbatim, followed by the draft that I brought to my Monday workshop group, followed by the current version that I've worked on since receiving comments from those first readers. In my head, I'd felt that the latest version was very similar to the pre-poem; yet when I reread the three versions, I could see that my brain had been doing work: stripping down, synthesizing, choosing an imaginative trail.

I can't post the three drafts here because that would count as "publication" and I may want to submit the final version to a journal. But I would be happy to email them to you privately and then discuss your responses here, if you think that sort of conversation would be helpful.