Note, I’m not posting my chapters in the order they’ll be in when I publish this book, just randomly as I come across material I think will make a chapter–or across an already written chapter. This chapter returns to my diary excerpts starting with one from a Tuesday late in October 1990.
A lady from the school system visited today’s writers’ group meeting for a while, too. She had talked to Nell about having members of our club give talks to local high school English classes and/or creative writing clubs. She left before I could talk with her. I’m fairly interested in participating. I think it’d do me good to give a talk to a creative writing club. I now tend to think nothing much will come of it. The lady seemed very nice but I would have thought she’d have talked to us rather than just listened if she were serious. (Nothing ever came of this.)
Wednesday 24 October 1990 was a Red-Letter Day for me: 2 copies of the latest Kaldron arrived from Karl, and two of my visual poems were in it, “Streetscene” and “Homage to Shakespeare.” Excellent issue, as I had already decided before finding that I’d been included in it. A few days later I heard from Jake Berry that he had decided to use “otherstream” as the adjective of choice to describe the kind of work he and others like him do. This word did catch slightly on. I don’t think it’s much used anymore. Nonetheless, it’s the only one of my coinages that has made it into even minimal use by the general public.
A few weeks later I wrote a letter to Bruce Bawer, a reviewer for The New Criterion to whom I sent a copy of my book, mainly because he spoke of teaching a course devoted to the sonnet in his last piece for the New Criterion. THE LETTER, I BELIEVE WAS ABOUT WILLIAMS’S RED WHEELBARROW. I eventually wrote about out exchange and about the poem but (naturally) can’t find what I wrote, which I wanted to insert here. Hence, all the caps: they are to remind me to connect this with the red wheelbarrow stuff when I finally get it into my book.
Friday 21 December 1990 I glanced at Manywhere to get an idea of how much rewriting I’d have to do for a second edition. I didn’t find out, but in the process I started re-writing, spending twenty minutes or so on each of the first three chapters. They seemed quite good to me. Just one or two spots that needed clarification. But the chapters did seem on a higher level than I thought they were when I was writing them. In other words, they aren’t for the average reader at all. I had hoped they might work for such a reader, at least in spots. I now see no way of reaching such readers with the book. It is for the cultured. But I still want to simplify it substantially–to make it all for cultured non-specialists instead of in part for the cultured specialist only. I’m enthusiastic at the moment about succeeding in that. Certainly the first three chapters shouldn’t give any intelligent cultured reader any problems.
I concentrated on getting together a second edition of my book over the next few days, finishing my revision on the first day of 1991. Here are some of the comments I made about the revision in my diary as I worked on it:
The paragraph about Pound’s opinion of meter gave me a lot of trouble. I wanted to redo it pretty thoroughly but got so tangled up with the rewrite that I ended hardly changing it at all.
23 December 1990: I plowed through six more chapters of my book. I’m now satisfied that all but the last are about as good as I can make them. The last is close to that, but is very long so I’m sure there are a few mistakes in it I missed.
30 December 1990 I got myself going just enough to try to fix up my equaphor chapter, which I expected to be the hardest to get right. Well, I did pretty well on it, and kept going, taking care of the next two chapters as well. One of them was easy–simply a matter of entirely deleting it. The other was not all that easy, but not terribly difficult, either. It was the one with the Klee analysis in it. That analysis is now the only thing in it. I’m feeling quite good about the book now. I think I’ve gotten it better. Certainly, it is simpler, and it ought to go more smoothly. The next problem to be solved in the insertion of my new sonnet material. Then I just have to simplify the parts concerning pluraesthetic poetry and I’ll be done. I doubt that I have more than a full week-end’s amount of work left to do, so I should finish it before my birthday, which would be nice.
31 December 1990 I was eager to work on my book and did some good work on it for an hour or two in the morning, but got tired and left it till 3:30 or so when I worked on it for another hour or so. As a result I now have it organized as I want it, with passages about my work on the sonnet coming more often than they did, and structuring the whole better. I still need to revise the final six chapters, the last one needing an especially large amount of work. I am convinced the final product will be quite good, though. But I’m tired of the book again so probably will leave it for a while before doing the last part of my rewrite. I’ll be terribly disapointed, however, if I don’t have it done before my birthday.
Next day: I worked on my book on and off right up to a little while ago and finished it. I didn’t reduce the terminology as much as I’d hoped to but got rid of probably half the neologies it had before. The glossary now has 72 terms in it, 30 of them my coinages. The book itself is slightly less than 57,000 words long, or about two thousand shorter than it was before. So it has to be a smoother read. The problem is that it will still probably seem over-arcane to most readers, even intelligent ones. At this point I don’t see what more I can do. But maybe I’ll think of something.
Tags: Bob Grumman