Short term, long term

I seem to have caught up with a number of projects, translations, journalism. The big project of course is the poetry manuscript which I have been ordering and reordering, trying to see individual poems objectively and being ruthless about trimming or eliminating them; trying also to have their arrangement--what follows what--coherent. This can be done by something as simple as changing a title, or a tiny reference, but ideally all the poems are somehow reflective of the same, personal reality, and this is much harder to accomplish.

Of course some books of poetry have a project at the outset--they write about this or that--the 1918 flu epidemic, for instance--but mine doesn't. The small picture is personal, the larger one has to be more universal. This is difficult. And slow.

Weather still cold and damp. It blurs the edges of things, the moisture in the air. 

The journalistic projects: mainly reviews. The latest one is about done. I like these. I enjoy writing them and I like seeing my byline in print: short-term gratification.