Some Thoughts on the New Year and the Life of the Thesis

The thesis is coming to a close in the next few months. I’m satisfied with the state of most of the poems, people are telling me they’re pretty good, and a bunch of them are in rotation for submissions. So what’s next?

This blog is about the thesis. And Ahead a Wild Fire will definitely have a life this year. I need to rewrite a couple of the poems, then there is the Reading List / Annotated Bibliography to finalize, then the Artistic Statement, then the Defense, then the Thesis Readings, then Formatting Approval, then Graduation. All of this is more or less related to the thesis in some way. But the life of this book does not stop there, because the goal is to get it out there and published.

That goal requires spending a lot more time with the manuscript. In its current form, I’ve been working with the book for about four or five months. As I said, I am confident in most of the poems, but I would like to see them evolve even a little more. There is also the question of ordering the poems. Ahead a Wild Fire is 50 pages long, without the required thesis materials. I’m fairly satisfied with the order, but I’m sure there are a few changes which could be made. For example, the manuscript is currently in one long section, and I have been contemplating sectioning it off into three smaller sections, though the problem of ordering really becomes apparent then.

A few of the poems are on the submissions circuit, but I’ve also been thinking about putting a chapbook or two together from this group. This might be a good way to develop an order for the larger manuscript.

So, lots of work still to do.

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