Strange Places

manuscript is out of my hair

Posted by Daniela Elza on Jan 31 2010

It has been a busy month. Writing. Finally, after so many years, I have compiled a full length manuscript. It is a collection of the poems I have written over the course of a decade (at least) with the presence or image of crows. Poems that puzzled me with their insistence and persistence. Kept cropping up among the other poems. I thought is was just a phase. They have not left me, these crows.

The work on the manuscript brought its own fascinations and rewards. To see these poems all in one place is like giving life to something new. The way they start echoing each other. The way they start telling things that individually they could not. Along side I am figuring out where to sent the manuscript, and how the whole process works. What the requirements are. How to play this new for me game.

(I have sent it out. I did, last week. It still has not sunk in. Even as I write it here it is hard to believe.)

Also finished writing a poetics piece for a journal, which I just sent out. Will be launching now into a collaboration on a paper on the topic between poetry and philosophy. While at the same time conjuring up a dissertation proposal.

For now there is tonight. I can forget about all that and open Aizlinn Hunter’s new book. It is called a Peepshow with Views of the Interior: Paratexts. Reminds me a bit of a collaboration I did which recently came out in the Academic Pathologies issue of educational insights. A piece in which the whole text/”paper” is in the footnotes, and the paper is just one sentence long.
In this book Hunter is working with the parts that come along with and around the text like contents, dedication, afterword, note from the translator, acknowledgements, prologue etc.
The paratexts become the text. :-)
It is promising to be a good read.