writing, books, { & stuff }

*1*

i think that i'm going to need some good poetry books for the first few months of motherhood

i can see myself sitting up nursing late in the night, poetry book in one arm baby in the other, and, highly emotional and sleep deprived, scrawling out the best poetry i've ever written, long-hand, by lamplight......

maybe that is a bit romanticized, but either way, i'm hoping to sell some of my old no-longer-desired poetry books on amazon so i can build up a little cache of quality poetry books for the early months.

my wishlist:
Human Chain by Seamus Heaney (because I love Seamus! just as charming on paper as he is in person)
Back by George Ella Lyon (because I was completely enraptured with Catalpa, her one and only other poetry book that isn't for children)
Windfall by Maggie Anderson
Desire Lines by Lola Haskins
The Forces of Plenty by Ellen Bryant Voigt
Messenger by Ellen Bryant Voigt
The Selected Poetry of Rainier Maria Rilke (this one i've read before, but its always good for a re-read)
Vita Nova by Louise Glück (because I don't own enough Glück books)

*2*

NaPoWriMo. should i participate this year? 

in november heather and i embarked on a like challenge (and were successful!), but i'm not sure about doing it again so soon. do challenges like that lead to quantity over quality? is it rushing it? will it burn me out? when all was said and done, i think about half of what i wrote last november was usable, after lots of editing. which, still, is much more than i would've typically written in a month, at my poem-a-week pace.

on the other hand, i don't think a baby will leave much time for writing that much again this november. plus, challenges are fun. and who says i actually have to complete the challenge?

by the way, B refuses to believe that anyone actually calls it that. NaPoWriMo, seriously, its a term, i tell him. and he laughs.

*3*

i've done a lot of work on my manuscript this past month. after using wordcounter, i determined that i needed to cut back on some of the frequently used words in my collection--which was a great exercise, it helped get rid of repetitions in ideas, metaphors, etc. sometimes it was hard--i had to cut one or two otherwise good poems because they just weren't Different enough--and, as a professor told me, sometimes it meant making an individual poem Less in order to make the whole More. i'm pretty happy with what i have right now, and working up a little list of places to send my manuscript in the coming months. its a bit of a measly number, due to not much cash to put towards contests, but i figure a little bit of trying is better than not at all. plus, i'm not really in a rush--i'd really love to have it published before i'm 30, so i've got half a decade of wiggle room.