In December, I finished up and submitted! my manuscript, Echolocate | | Echolocated! (submitted for consideration to: Green Linden, Two Sylvias Press, and Yes Yes Books)
manuscript
- origins of the term (1944) + considering adding definitions of term (2 dec)
- changing title to “Vision Lost” and adding words to a gash, a gap, a space of possibility (6 dec)
- 2 more poems, one about an evicted creek, the other about daylighting — some useful 3-beat phrases to put in another poem (10 dec)
- “To navigate by adjustment, shifts, echoes”; who locates, who is located — I/You; me/the Girl (the girl as me, age 8) (18 dec)
Do This!
As I finished up my manuscript, I started thinking about what I wanted to do next. I came up with a few (too many?!) ideas:
- find out what the mysterious wooden post near the trestle are (5 dec)
- more on rust and erosion — JJJJJerome Ellis and Emily Dickinson (6 dec)
- have fun with the portmanteau, SWOLF (assessing efficiency of stroke, equation out of number of strokes per distance and time for distance (12 dec)
- put words — in articles, poems, mine — through the rock quarry: 1, 2, and 3 syllable words — example: Emily Dickinson’s “Before I got my Eye put out” (13 dec)
- quarried E Dickinson’s “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark” (14 dec)
- I, Emily Dickinson (15 dec)
- a Playlist about vision — eyes, sight, see, originally called “Eye Tunes,” but changed to “Sight Songs” (16 dec)
- M (e)y(e) Emily Dickinson (17 dec)
My Emily Dickinson. It’s the title of a Susan Howe book, which I’ve read bits of and own. The lecture/chapter in Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey, “My Emily Dickinson,” which I also own and love. And, “My My Emily Dickinson,” an essay in Kenyon Review by Meg Shevenock. I have the title already: My Eye Emily Dickinson, or My Eye and Emily Dickinson, or Eye: Emily Dickinson or My Eyes and Emily Dickinson, or M(e)y(e) Emily Dickinson? In addition to rereading the other “My Emily Dickinson” books/lectures/essays, I would revisit her lines that are about sight and vision and experiment with ways to describe their importance for me as I navigate losing vision. The experiments could include poems and essays and practices and whatever else I can think of.
- cut-outs, erasures, blackouts with mississippi river gorge text + Horace Cleveland (19 dec)
- more on erasures, blind spots, Mary Ruefle (20 dec)
- more on blind spots, and new visual poetry with my blind spot + reviewing old entries tagged with “vision” (21 dec)
- seeing / glancing / glimpsing — pastoral / landscape / how I see (23 dec)
- instead of these other projects, update my design/blog + how to be project (24 dec)
- Charles Olson, place and This is polis / and, again, back to blind spot, erasures, visual poetry with Colette Love Hilliard (26 dec)
- William S. Burroughs and cut-outs (27 dec)
- an end of the year cento, made up of lines from poems gathered in 2025: starting the project (30 dec)