Well, it looks like I'll be staying with the manuscript for a while. It's just not ready. :( Hopefully, I can enjoy revising and improving it. I guess working on an acknowledgement page was a bit premature. I will call and communicate, but I simply can't publish it as is now.

Today it's windy! Hope it dies down before 7pm, so I can go for a walk.

I've been journaling a lot but writing less. Tonight I hope to try to write something new as I am really tired of dealing with the manuscript. I will stay away from it for a week or two and then hopefully get back into the revision process. I think I was in a hurry to publish due to comparing myself to others progress, but my pace apparently is slower than I thought. I worked on Pity for 5 years, but I had some of the poems as early as ten years before the book came out. Overall, I was disgusted with po-biz, but I need to spend my time healing and resting right now, so I'll contact someone and let them know it's still in progress. I am overwhelmed in many ways with trying to keep up with others. It will find a home when it's ready, and it's simply not ready. It's been nagging me for some time now, knowing something isn't right, feeling the lines were too flat, maybe listening to too many people too. So, B will blow a gasket when I tell him since I told him I was essentially done. I'm not. I will try to give it a few more months, maybe two to six more months of revision. I don't know.

I am working on my acknowledgements page. Here it is so far. I am sure I have forgotten someone.

Thanks.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following journals where some of these poems have appeared or will appear, sometimes in different forms:

Bordersenses: “Brandy Down Our Throats Like Fire”
CopperNickel: “He wants a poem”
Huizache: “La Chingada,” “Three,” and “For the Fire Happy Boss at the 7-11 on Ralston and Wadsworth in what surely is the middle of hell: Arvada, Colorado”
The Wisconsin Review: “Border”
Bridges: A Feminist Journal: “Gall Bladder”
Feminist Studies: “Chico’s Tacos”
Many Mountains Moving: This is the Wintry Season,” and “The Flowers Coming Soon”
Margie: “Coming Home” and “Born in the Southwest”
American Literary Review: “Mortar”
Eleventh Muse: Nada
Ensemble Jourine: Hybrid Writing by Women: “Kitchen of Grief”
Standards: The International Journal of Multicultural Studies: “Lubbock, Texas 1981”
Women’s Studies Quarterly: “Beginning and Ending”

I would also like to thank a number of residencies, which afforded me time to write and focus wholly on the manuscript: Ragdale, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Anderson Center. I would like to thank Letras Latinas and the Guild Complex for supporting residencies at Yaddo and the Anderson Center. I would like to thank Sandra Cisneros for the Alfredo del Moral Foundation Award which provided much needed financial support.

I would also like to thank the following individuals for their help and support with the manuscript and/or my development as a poet: Wendy Albiatti, Sharon Michael, Eduardo C. Corral, Bryan Roth, Lew Forrester, Suzanne Friskhorn , Kristin Buckles, Leslie Ullman, Benjamin Saenz, Bruce Bond, Paul Gutierrez, Christine Granados, Carmen Seda and Dagoberto Gilb.

A big rat, manuscript notes, po-biz frank talk, and adjuncting your way to death

Geez. My roomate and I just saw a gigantic rat outside the apartment. It got mad at us and started shaking the bushes! It was huge and white.

On a more serious note, I called someone who said to call tomorrow about the manuscript. I went to workshop today and got a lot of good feedback on "The Damselfly." A couple of poems in the manuscript deal with damselflies and dragonflies. Feeling kind of confused about what to do with the manuscript, so I think I'll put of deciding what to do with it for a few days. It was recommended for publication by three readers with editing, so I have been revising since November and am concerned I am taking way too long with it. Wondering if this press reads over the summer. Oh yes, I can call. What an idea.

*

I made some jokes about PTSD and maybe shouldn't have. In any case, my poetry life is quite dull-- revision and more revision. No circle of gifts to give other than words and reading other people's books and doing the occasional review over a book I enjoy. I am disappointed in myself these last few years, as I was overwhelmed with being an adjunct. When I say it nearly killed me, I am not joking. Overall, I don't recommend earning an M.F.A. but more so the PhD is something I will caution anyone in pursuing, unless they plan on attending a top notch school, and I'll say poetry may be the same way. I mean the M.F.A. in poetry. I think the decks are stacked with students of various programs earning the dough. I also think my first book was a true disaster. I didn't realize it would get so little attention all the while self-serving individuals touted their reputations as being "generous" when they were utterly selfish. But we are all learning in this I suppose. It seems this second collection has been daunting. I was too angry, and that anger comes from wounds which are no joke.

I can forgive. I am trying my best to get better.

I have had very different reactions to the second manuscript as a whole. Some like it better than Pity and others don't seem to like it as much. It is different. I think the book was overshadowed by male Latino writers who were avid self marketers and I grew disillusioned at what appeared to be very gendered margins, with the women on the outside. Then it appeared women who were supported more than I was even though I had thought I won some prize, but in the end the Poetry Foundation created a page for me for which I am thankful,but in some ways I am concerned they have their heads up their asses.

*


I am at peace applying for disability and have come to the conclusion that it affords me time to rest and heal. I don't care if people don't understand. The phrase, "pick yourself up by the bootstraps" comes to my mind, and I understand that sentiment, but I think we cannot really put ourselves in others' shoes or traumas or illnesses. All I know is that some things online are public and prove later to be embarrassing, but I feel blessed now that I have a chance to breathe, to read and to write. Being an adjunct is simply terrible. When I was at U.T.E.P. a fairly young man needed a heart transplant. He didn't get one. He wasn't afforded health insurance. He died. I wonder how many other adjunct English instructors across the country are succumbing to such illnesses. This is why I am applying for disability. I need medical care which I cannot afford without health insurance. It's a sad testament maybe to my own deficiencies which are many, but also a sad testament to the current situation in which many adjunct instructors find themselves. I really think something needs to be done down the line, but it is all supply/demand I suppose, but those tenured profs are often unaware at the absurdity of their salaries being three times the size of those of adjuncts. I'm not saying anything new. The Chronicle of Higher Education runs stories about this all the time, but nothing is changing, and I'm jumping that sinking ship if you know what I mean.

*

Going to the workshop tomorrow. Went to another poetry group the other night, which was nice. I realize I've been through some real war-style poetry workshops years ago. Glad that's over.

"Life is strange. If you love something let it go, if it comes back to you it was yours, if it doesn't it never was." --?

Thinking about that quote tonight, trying not to worry, to just enjoy the moment. But love sure is a bitch.

Will workshop a poem called "The Damselfly" in the workshop if there's time. Eager to write some new poems this summer and to spend time revising older work.

Almost finished with the manuscript. A few days?

Almost finished with the manuscript. I think I need a few days, a few comments and then I'm going to send it back, since I can always further revise if necessary. It's time. I'm ready to move on to another project.

This song makes me smile. I am getting ready to pay, oh pay taxes. I've been reading an issue of Poetry Sept. 2010 and finding the poems witty. I think my poems need more wit, or at least think it's interesting to readers who are not poets. But I dislike hard judgment in poems, though I am guilty of the same thing in poems. Drinking chai getting ready to write the first of many monthly checks which will possibly kill me :(

I'm also still reading THE SHIPPING NEWS by Annie Proulx and the jury is still in session on that one, though I do find it interesting as this guy is a loser and feels himself a loser, or at least the narrator does. I can relate to the character so far, feeling somewhat defective and learning only this year it's a result of PTSD.

My friend and I yesterday were laughing at PTTSD, post teaching traumatic stress disorder!!! hahaha

I guess a lot of people are grading right now, and I can only report that I am still recovering from PTTSD.

Went ahead and added two poems to the manuscript tonight. One poem I previously added "She came as dragonflies in death over the pines in a dream," may go. I've since streamlined the poem somewhat, but it's difficult to make sense of it in terms of what the hell is it about. I'm dumbfounded by my feelings over the second manuscript still titled Seven with Latin section titles much to the chagrin of some people, but I will go with the advice of someone who just won a major prize over them. Sorry B. I am just blathering here in the middle of the night/early morning to try to figure out what to do with the damn thing. I want to mail it off to be done with it. I can't seem to cut out one poem which bothers me, but no criticism was really made of the poem, and so in the end we have to rely on our own gut and sensibility. This thing is driving me mad. So next step is to really take a look at "Ouray's Eyes" and decide if it should go. I am crazy staying up late lately trying to avoid it and then trying to fix it. The people who say just send it in want me to start anew fresh with a new project since the writing of this thing occurred with I had a severe episode which left me with one lost friend, it was more than a buildingsroman story arc, more of a madhouse where the chairs smell of piss and the chairs are all made of plastic without cushions as if that could calm down some one's sense of fear. So cutting the poem has value, but maybe the piece can be fixed with streamlining it.


* THOUGHT BLOCK TO calm racing thoughts
I don't know what to do with Ouray's Eyes, it's a photograph poem about an Indian Chief who interacted with the army to try to save his people, to keep them alive meant feigning, pretending if you will and surely this poem can be a better poem if I just work it out somehow.