I am, at the moment, struggling with a new poem.  It started with a pleasant idea, which I suppose is no stunning endorsement, but each time I think I have nailed down the mechanics of the poem, I make a discovery which confounds that logic.

When this happens to me, I often find that some time away helps, so I just leave the poem alone.  And since I am hosting trivia tonight, I will probably do just that.  But it pains me to walk away from this one. I have this nagging suspicion that what it really requires is more attention, not less attention.

My impulse towards making the poem, as opposed to just writing it, has been strong lately.  I find myself drawn to heavily organized information resembling received forms.  And it shows in what I have been enjoying reading recently.

Speaking of what I’m reading, I’m in the middle of a novel, too, and just about three times on every page, I ask myself, “How on earth is the writer pulling this off?” If you analyze it at the sentence level, most of his prose is ridiculous and impossibly unstable.  The novel ought to be a mess, despite its careful organization, just because those sentences are so far out.  But it’s working.  I remember feeling this way about Hitchcock’s Vertigo.  The individual elements in that movie were so out of whack that they simply should not have worked.  But they do.  They work famously.