This morning I begged the beautiful and brilliant poet Catherine Barnett (author of Into Spheres Such Perfect Holes Are Pierced) to meet me in the lobby of the elementary school (our kids go to the same school) and help me with some commas. As usual, she came through for me. I had a short list of questions, and it didn’t take much time. Occasionally Catherine lingered over a poem, reading, I could tell, for meaning, rather than simply to answer the question and said, “I’m excited for the book.” Book? All I see are words on a page, commas here and there—probably too many. The acknowledgments aren’t standardized. I detest the closed-dot subsection ornaments. The all-caps bother me—TOO EMPHATIC!—and sometimes, when italics meet an em-dash, the two lean into each other like drunken teenagers and begin to collapse. The “w” in Bell font has a little “u” shape inside, which both pleases me and embarrasses me in ways I can’t explain. Some of the poems in this manuscript were written more than seven years ago, and I’ve been revising them off-and-on since then. Now I can hardly see them except as layout and symbols, a code I invented that once stirred me with feeling. Perhaps this makes me a good editor—the ability to objectify the poems and see them as not-mine, unfamiliar? But, I am horrified by the thought that perhaps my husband feels this way when he sees my naked body. Something dear that has since lost meaning. The way a name, repeated, becomes a word, then a sound, then marks on a page.
In October, the manuscript-transformed-to-book will arrive in my mailbox. We will meet one another like lovers who have aged and changed and dressed in unfamiliar clothes.

05.18.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

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