Friday: Day of Drafting and Splitting a Pair

82º ~ good sun, small breeze, on the way back into the 90’s for the next few days

Today was the start of a new journal, pictured here for your enjoyment.

This morning was a bit more fragmented than I like for drafting days.  The order of my routine was jostled, which should be fine b/c I have nowhere to be at any given time; however, I felt disjointed when I did sit down to draft.  I tried reading a few poems to get me going…no luck.  I tried copying out good words from said poems and using the random number generator (explained here and here) to start knocking words together in hope of a spark…no luck, although one word group gave me a slight tingle: bone and hook. 

Growing up in a fishing family, I’d been around several accidents involving a hook lodging in someone’s hand, but the idea of the hook sinking into the bone kept swimming around in my head.  I wrote out “the hook in the bone,” and then I remembered a line from last Friday that I didn’t use: “there are ghosts in these fingers,” and I started imagining the skeleton of a drowned girl at the bottom of the lake I used to visit with my family.  All of a sudden, the lines were tumbling into the journal…very mismatched and scattered, but I felt like there was something there.  I fiddled and fiddled with it and got it onto the computer.  Eventually, I realized that I was drafting two separate poems or at least two parts of a poem.  Thus I split the pair, in blackjack parlance, as I eventually removed one section from the draft and opened a new document to work on it separately.  So now, what I have to show for today’s drafting are two poems “Midwestern Fairy Tale for Drowned Girls, Part 1” and “MFTforDG, Part 2.”  I’m not sure if they should remain separate poems with the titles connecting them or if I should merge them back to the same document and use section headers within the poem itself.  That feels like a question that needs to wait a while, as the poems gain a little age in the folder.

I did find myself killing trees again.  These poems are more narrative than last week’s lyric poem and I found myself fussing over small choices and needing to reprint every change so I could read through the entire draft again.  I’m interested in seeing if this pattern holds true in the future.