>>I have the desire to press you once again to tell us how you do it. Surely there is some simple algorithm, a paint-by-numbers approach you could tell us, if only you wanted to share it!
If only. I can tell you what happened with this poem. I'd had "Galatea" for about ten years but had never been satisfied with it. It occurred to me that it might be too weak to stand as an individual poem, so one day the idea of a sequence popped into my head. I composed most of "Afterwords" orally, reciting into a microcassette recorder while driving from Texas to North Carolina. I ended up with a bunch of usable fragments that I assembled over a couple of days at my mother's house. There was quite a bit of revision, and there are still some things I'm not entirely happy with but can't think of how to remedy. I do find that most of the poems I've written in the last few years have come out of sessions with the tape recorder.
The chief difficulty with these poems is that I knew how each one was going to end. When this happens (and sometimes you know only the beginning) there's quite a bit of bumbling and fumbling and stumbling before you can figure out how to get to point B when you don't know where point A is. Of course, once I got into the sequence it began to generate some energy and momentum of its own, so it became easier as it went on. I wanted the voices (or at least the tones of the voices) to be discrete yet to share the same pissed-off sensibility.
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