Some hard decisions--crafting a new manuscript
So I cut the secondary and tertiary sequence out of the manuscript I've been working on. Here it is now:
Table of Contents
Atlas
These are your battlefields
These are your boardwalks
This is your breeze
These are your bridges
These are your canyons
These are your capital cities
This is your city
These are your countries
These are your docks
These are your hagiographers
These are your holy places
These are your horizons
These are your interstates
These are your maps
These are your meadows
These are your monuments
This is your Oceania
These are your parks
These are your pastures
These are your plains
These are your salt flats
These are your skies
These are your springs
These are your strings of barbed wire
This is your tremor
These are your volcanoes
This is your wall
Ledger
This is your aftermath
This is your art
These are your asylums
These are your banners
These are your billboards
This is your church
These are your engines
These are your evenings
These are your foundries
These are your goods
These are your inquests
This is your light
These are your mercies
These are your murders
These are your nights
These are your orders
This is your purview
These are your processions
This is your product
These are your questions
These are your radio towers
These are your ramparts
This is your reliquary
This is your sanitarium
These are your spires
These are your squares
These are your structures
These are your temples
This is your tomb
This is your weather
This is your window
These are your winters
Zoo
This is your assembly
This is your beastiary
These are your beasts
These are your birds
These are your coffee people
These are your dead
These are your dissidents
These are your followers
These are your horses
These are your nurseries
These are your phantoms
These are your refugees
This is your rival
These are your scribes
These are your stables
These are your subjects
This is your subject
These are your sugar men
These are your witnesses
Appendix
This is your photo
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It's cleaner. There's a palpable gap in the last section. I'm going to try to back-fill them during this poem-a-day group writing adventure I'm in. There needs to be more inhabitants in the book. There's also an arc with an artist and a general that I've abandoned, but there are still the poems from that arc housed within this current formulation of the manuscript, so I need to either cut or expand. I think I might expand. Problem is the manuscript measures out to be 89 pages. A problem if I was planning on entering the thing into contests, but I don't.
***
Other things, I changed my title. It used to be "Dear Empire," but so many of the poems had that address, that I wanted the title to provide an ur narrative. Something that is deeper.
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Assembled it while listening to these guys: