Sunday, June 26, 2005

Putting together

another book, so have been trawling through the archives - the tail feathers? the beak? - of the pelican.

Am surprised, not by the quantity of poems - if you post most days, & much of that is poetry, then you're going to end up with a lot of poems - but by the strength of a significant proportion of it.

I tend to think of what I post here as almost throwaway. Much like the piece immediately below. & a lot of what I write is raw, unrevised. But a lot of it holds up quite well.

So put the first cull together, add some things from other outlets, look, discard, consider again. & I still end up with around 120 pages. This sure ain't gonna be your traditional slim volume.

2 comments:

Tom Beckett said...

This may seem irreverent but is not meant to be so.

I'm reminded by the bird references in your passage of a friend's science project during junior high.

I lived in the rural suburbs of Philadelphia at the time (early 60's), truly in the country (since developed over).

Anyway, this friend gathered up vast quantities of owl shit from beneath a great old tree. He then carefully sifted through the droppings for the undigested rodent bones which he would reassemble into full skeletons.

Tom Beckett said...

Make that mid-sixties.