Sheaves

The other day, at a coffee shop, I was juggling my laptop, a printed copy of the manuscript and a pile of poems I've written since I started this project (i.e. My Semester of Quitting possibly aka My Year of Quitting) that I just call The Sheaf.

I noticed that, when you look at it from the top, the thickness of the MS and the thickness of The Sheaf are about equal. I was like, holy sheaf.

So I counted today. 42 poems in The Sheaf. 39 poems in the MS. Now, I'm not saying that all 42 in the The Sheaf are Freakin Amazing. They are first / second / third drafts. But there's 42 of them. And they are individual completed poems, not fragments or notes for poems.

When have I ever written 42 poems in, let's give a nice wide estimate here, ninety days? I need a reader. I need a reader who is going to patiently tell me which ones of these are going somewhere and which are better left on the launch pad. I need a reader who is qualified, honest, but not needlessly brutal. Some of these have been shown around, but most have only been seen by me. Some of them are in a writing style drastically different from what is in the MS.

I really do feel like I was semi-catatonic for six years and that my brain is trying to make up for lost time. But those were six years of working. Six years of good teaching. I was a good teacher. I was lost in the work. I am a good teacher. I apparently am not so good at multi-tasking. Before I let this blow up into a big unwieldy existential question about my future, I really need to take a shower and leave the house.