Jigsawing together a poetry ms

I finished this 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle of a Van Gogh painting, and it only took 2 1/2 years! Seriously, my family started it on Thanksgiving 2020, stalled out, rolled it up on one of those felt contraptions, bagged it, and threw it in a corner of the living room. This week was quiet with Chris away, so on a whim I pulled it out. I quickly became obsessed, for reasons I didn’t understand. I don’t want to tell you how many hours I spent sorting and fitting the little streaky pastel pieces. (P.S.: I eventually found the final missing shape, after I broke the puzzle up and reboxed it, of course.)

As soon as I did, I was able to return to some difficult work that was stalled: making a near-last revision to my next poetry book, Mycocosmic, and working on the elaborate author questionnaire I mentioned last week. These tasks have similarities to finishing a jigsaw puzzle: for instance, both involve sifting through patterns, although a puzzle has one solution and a book many possible good shapes. But working on one cleared my head for the other, I think, oddly enough in the way Ann E. Michael describes low-cognition chores in her recent blog post. Maybe there are a lot of poets out there taking breaks from mental work in this extreme July heat.

Finalizing a book involves ruthless analysis: in this case swapping out a couple of poems I didn’t want to admit weren’t quite up to par, and cutting verbiage or clarifying details in others. I’m also double-checking references, making sure I’m not repeating words or creating bad juxtapositions, and working on acknowledgements. I went down a very long rabbit hole in considering fonts. I’ll have to proof the Table of Contents when I’m done and start querying magazines about unpublished poems, as I’ve learned others do: hey, last chance for a Mycocosmic poem, with the book coming in 18 months! There will be an editorial round with Tupelo and eventually galleys to proof, but it’s my job beforehand to make the ms as tight as possible. I, of course, thought I had done this before submission, but I’ve never reread one of my books without spotting ways to improve it–a humbling phenomenon.

I’m now taking turns between these ms tasks and composing a Reader’s Companion–see examples from Tupelo here–and trying to write appealing descriptions for publicity (the questionnaire asks for them in three lengths). I’d love your take on my drafts for the latter, below. Do any aspects of any version make you excited to read the book? Are some sentences weedy, waffling, dull, too arrogant, too modest? It’s funny how this involves the same skills as reviewing: I’m essentially pre-reviewing myself.

One sentence

The teeming underground world of Mycocosmic, Lesley Wheeler’s sixth poetry collection, is mycelial: fungal poems infiltrate spell poems, increasing the weird charm of both.

One paragraph

Without fungi and bacteria, death would overwhelm the planet. In Lesley Wheeler’s latest poetry collection, Mycocosmic, a fungal poetics metabolizes secrets, grief, and anger, enabling fresh beginnings. The book’s spell poems, prayers, hexes, and invocations summon transformation, and beneath them, one line per page, runs a book-length “underpoem.” Part verse and part footnoted essay, “Underpoem [Fire Fungus]” nourishes the incantatory words of the collection’s above-ground world, creating a powerful symbiosis.    

Extended

“Good things come to you through fire,” a Tarot reader told Lesley Wheeler as she was composing what became her sixth collection, Mycocosmic. But how could that be true, while the planet was burning and life slamming her with personal losses? One answer arrived when she learned about pyrophilic fungi that lurk in soil until wildfires activate them. Enter mycelia and a busy underground world that metabolizes death, transforming what remains so that life can begin anew.

Mycocosmic offers spell poems—prayers, hexes, and invocations—summoning change. Wheeler’s mother’s recent death is an occasion for mourning and memory but also an opportunity to put difficult truths in print about sexuality; depression and a midlife diagnosis of bipolar disorder; family abuse; and many doubts and failures. Some poems use free verse or invented forms, while others borrow the incantatory power of litany, sonnets, and other inherited shapes: bref double, golden shovel, gigan, LaCharta, and the villanelle.

Beneath them, one line per page, runs the book-length “Underpoem [Fire Fungus],” part verse and part footnoted essay. Its lines—independently and in symbiosis with the collection’s above-ground poems—nourish change and highlight its urgency. As Merlyn Sheldrake writes in Entangled Life, “Mycelium describes the most common of fungal habits, better thought of not as a thing but as a process: an exploratory, irregular tendency.” Creative practice roots in real and imagined communities and conversations. Mycocosmic dramatizes how interdependence binds us together.