30 Days of Poetry: a Poet's Log Book of Daily Efforts in Poetry for National Poetry Month
Day 8: get offer to read in NYC at the end of the month of April. Spend the rest of evening making arrangements to make that possible. Things to consider: transportation, place to stay, days of visit.
Day 9: revise the manuscript I'm working on. Today I just did a couple poems. What I'm doing with this current draft, to really polish the work, is making an "annotated" version. Are my annotations explaining too much or is the poem doing enough work without them? If the option is the former, I work on revising the poem to get it to stand alone better. It's painstaking, but really helpful. Thankfully, I feel there's more poems that "work" than do not.
Day 10-13: Sometimes you need to read other people's works in order to get a better focus on the direction that you want your own writing to go. On days 10-13 I read "The Diary of Anais Nin" and took notes. It's helped with the end of the mss and what I want to revise to, the voice I want to truly come through. I took my notebook and book and pen to the cafe down the street. They have good chocolate chip cookies (I'm a cookietarian, remember). I started off with cookie and earl grey and water. Then a got a couple beers, each $3 as the cafe was rotating out their winter stock.
Day 14: Looked through the "Call for Submissions" Facebook Group for journals that might seem like a good fit to submit to. I decided on two. I looked through the other manuscript of poems that I want to start publishing from (my graduate thesis) and pulled selections from those that I thought might appeal to the editors. I will let you know if there's good news in the future!
All 30 Days of Poetry entries are here.