recycle folder, scraps to be used later. Once the book has duende, as Federico Garda Lorca would put it, I put it in manuscript form and begin to revise. Sometimes new poems win places in between other poems where I didn't see gaps. It's really quite a bit of fun to put a manuscript together. I enjoy the heck out of it. (May 10, 1999)
JM: I also notice, just skimming through the book, a wide variety of poetic styles at work here. VS: Oh, I always try to experiment with line breaks and stanzas.
I like poems that look so clean on the page (couplets, I love them) and look, as my colleague David Kirby would put it, "elegant." Dressed to go out to a dinner party. I also like the narrative fluidity of indenting lines. I like that a lot. My experiences I think best fit these kinds of formal looking poems. But if you notice in the last part of the book, the line begins to disintegrate, and I like that as well. Words become scattered on the page. I like the fact that this book has a variety of possibilities for dress, if you consider poems as being naked before you finish them on the page. Something like that. That's why I like the work of Mary Oliver, Louise Gluck, and Billy Collins-because of the way the poems look. (May 10, 1999)
JM: What about the title? VS: You Come Singing comes from one of the poems in the book,
which an editor at Tia Chucha Press suggested, and I liked it because mostly I think the book is upbeat, a reaffirmation of how I've taken control of my life, I think, and how I've been lucky and charmed to live this kind of "outsider" life, which leads me always back to personal experience, and poetry. And I think it fits my voice, reading voice as well. I loved it when I first heard it. (May 10, 1999)
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