and I think by their not understanding, they created a challenge for me. Write, get known, get other people to say, hey, I read your son's book, his story, and it's pretty interesting. I hope it is. (May 3, 1999) JM: Your first collection of poetry, You Come Singing (Tia
Chucha, 1998), was recently published. Could you say something about your process of putting together a collection of poems such as this? You have three sections, each with its own title. Since this was your first full collection of poems, how did you go about choosing the poems and arranging the book? VS: The work that went into You Come Singing was hard to put together into the book and make it fit. The original title for the book was Rants & Chants which made it easier to squeeze poems into book form, but it worked out because I worked for a couple of months looking at and eyeing the poems, keeping out what didn't fit into the three sections. The section titles came later with the idea that if they were good enough, I could use them as the titles of forthcoming collections, like "Palm Crows," which is now a whole book by itself. I normally sit down to write from an idea for a poem, not for a book, so I will work during the year at generating work, and later when I sit there during the summer, I mean, that's the payoff for me as a writer of poems, I can sit there with a big stack of poems and reread and revise, then I begin to see thematic connections in the poems. That's how it worked and has worked for my books of poetry. I also have an excellent friend and fellow poet in town, Ryan G. Van Cleave, who will help me "walk" through all my poems. I believe it is a device Billy Collins uses in putting all his poems on the floor and then "eyeing" them as he walks back and forth. So I do the first few passes, then Ryan will help me do the last couple. There are so many poems in one year, that I get dizzy. Not all of them are up to my standards, so there's an initial throwing out of quite a bit of work. It hurts to do so, but it only goes to the
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