FOR APRIL 9


I'm going to improvise a bit. What I said about Chad's
book holds for us tomorrow night, though we are
going to go with a very streamlined approach to "work-
shopping" the manuscripts. What we want is to send
the poet home with a work he or she can rearrange /
fix / edit relatively quickly.Think like an editor. If
you ran a press and were going to publish each of these
as chapbooks, what would you suggest?

Do any of the poems feel incomplete?

At any point are there particular poems in which a drop
off in quality seems dramatic enough to raise questions in
a reader's mind about its inclusion in the book?

Think strategy: should the poems be grouped in such
a way that "like" poems are clumped together, or should
the manuscript be arranged so that a reader is constantly
being surprised by a shift in content or form? Should
the poems be arranged chronologically? Or alphabetically
by title, to give it a sort of accidental sense of "destiny"?

Does it FLOW from one poem to another?

Does the first poem introduce the reader to the poems in
a useful and / or surprising way? Perhaps one could defend
one approach over another. Is the last poem somehow
emblematic of the manuscript as a whole, stylistically, or
does it work by summarizing what has come earlier in the
manuscript (as to content)?

Are any of the poems just too lengthy? Would certain
poems suffer by being cut back?

I still want a favorite Foust poem. Yes, we are focusing on
getting the chapbooks done at this point (we really need to
move) but I still think these works are valuable in showing
what sorts of indeterminacy are available for the contemporary
poet, how poems that are about, indeed, the actual writing
of poems, are one subject available. Meaning is Foust's
subject, and to some degree he argues language gets in its
own way, so we might as well identify every word in
this architecture, this machine of words, this skeleton of
syntax and sentence, line and white space . . .

We don't have much time for this, but we'll hope the text
can speak for itself, and I can help it along with a
minimum of explanation . . .

But remember from previous post (I'm quoting)

"But I want each of you to choose a favorite Foust poem,
and be prepared to say why you dig it. These are difficult
poems, it seems at first, but not so much really. His poems
are ABOUT the difficulties of communication. Interesting
to note that the first three poems are titled after Van Halen
songs . . . " You know, remember, that there often isn't any-
thing to GET in poetry. Who KNOWS why something stands
out? Let's approach it from that angle . . .