Where I am putting this poem that I just wrote,

[elpollodiablo]

How do you decide which thing from Stereogum's front page to put where?

[coldforge]

ha, you asshole

[coldforge]

Jim, come to think of it, Fisher King references in my work must be the ultimate in stepping on your toes. I should stick to Hephaestus and Ilmarinen.

[fishjim]

Ha, yeah, there was a time when I thought a bit overmuch about the Fisher King. But no longer!

Now, I identify with Carrie Fisher.

[coldforge]

I've decided to continue to use this thread as a place to report (and for others to report) on my progress and the state of my writing practice, and leave Jim's omnium gatherum as a repository for the work itself.

I'm quite happy with my workflow these days; I've established a habit. Everything goes in the same place (a Ulysses document, as discussed in another thread), and I've got multiple bins for the various stages that a work can be in: new, draft, revised, final. I sit down, bang out something new, then chuck it in the bin and forget about it. Then I go into the bin and bring up something I've forgotten about for a couple days and do some proper editing. Things make real progress that way, and I think I'm striking a good balance between letting past works stand on their own merits and mercilessly chopping things up and refactoring them. It's funny how much of being a writer seems to hinge on having a healthy ego and self-image.

[coldforge]

I've come to realize what my 'nature' is in my poetry. Which is to say: so many of the poets that I like have a very concrete and cohesive inventory of objects and images, which are almost always rooted very directly in their natural environment. Thomas's Wales, Montale's Liguria, et cetera. And I don't have that; I've always been frankly blind to the majority of natural phenomena (in fact I wrote a poem about this tension). But I've come to recognize patterns in the symbols and images that are cropping up in my work, and how they are performing a similar function to the flora and fauna in the above poets' bodies of work—and instead of natural images, there's emerging a hodgepodge of gods, body parts, philosophers, philosophical concepts, cultural objects and other things. It's interesting. I'm slowly rendering my own unconscious landscape—the set of things I instinctively reach towards to illustrate my experience.

[fishjim]

Nice!

[coldforge]

I was going to inscribe your poem today, jim, but I forgot my pen.

[fishjim]

Cool, can't wait to see the variations.

Got a few items & ideas to send yr way for the journal. Will try to get to them today.

[coldforge]

I've been writing several series. One is called Migration—well, it's a series of poems named 'Migration I'-'III', but they're in sequence interspersed with other poems. The whole thing—I'm not sure what to call it yet. Maybe just call it Saturn.