![]() “History of the Apple” would be the first poem. Doom, ladies, stories: the answer here is clearly affirmative. The poems recount the girls’ adventures against the polluted, ill-fated landscape of central New Jersey. “Go” felt like the push I needed to tell my story, so the reader “may see” everything from the “lady // of gold arms” to “doom.” Sweetbitter centers on a character named Apple-Child, a fiercely elusive girl beloved by the speaker as a friend, a sister, and perhaps more. The gaps here felt like a pause-she had to think about it. What a cryptic, yet beautiful, yet utterly precise response. Should I start with History of the Apple as the frontispiece? I asked about my manuscript’s first poem and final poem: ![]() This Sappho-summoning went on for awhile, and the responses ranged from random to uncanny. I was mesmerized: equal parts hysterically facetious and somber. Sappho was there in the room and the revisions were rolling. I created new erasures and fit a few into the final section. So I asked Sappho:ĭoes the final section need a lyric erasure?ĭone. The final section, at the time, lacked any hybrid or erasure poems. The first section of Sweetbitter contains several erasures of 90s song lyrics, ranging from The Toadies’s “Possum Kingdom” to Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog.” The second section is a long poem with multiple found text/erasure fragments. (I ended up trying to appease the “two states of mind” by breaking down the fourth section and incorporating those poems into the three part structure.) Okay, so I didn’t get an easy answer, but the game had begun and I had a new way of thinking about the problem. Sappho was also conflicted! My confusion was validated. I concentrated on this question while flipping open to a random page, and landed on Fragment 51: Sappho, tell me about the three-part structure. At this point, I had a fourth section of poems that I wanted in the manuscript, but couldn't seem to fit within the other three sections. I knew I wanted Sweetbitter to have three sections, but I was struggling to make the structure work. Then, as if reading scraps of an ancient Greek horoscope or tarot card, Sappho would show me the way. I figured I’d focus on a question I had about the manuscript, then flip open If Not, Winter to a random page. I pulled out my copy of If Not, Winter and set my intentions. I wondered what Sappho would do, and decided to just ask her for help myself. One afternoon, when I was feeling especially frustrated, I traded my piñon coffee for a canned IPA and decided to ask an ancestor poet for guidance. Sometimes, I’d undo the day’s work by dusk. I’d make a change, or two, or several, some mornings. Every day, I’d look at the poems on the wall, thinking of them as moving parts. I printed the entire manuscript-in-progress and stuck each page to the wall of my casita with painter’s tape. It was close, but not yet there, and I committed to spending my time in Taos perfecting it. I had sent it out to presses and it had even been long-listed for a few contests. Most of the poems in the manuscript were solidly revised by that point, and the manuscript itself had taken shape. As I was working on my full-length poetry collection Sweetbitter, I was lucky enough to be an artist-in-residence at the gorgeous Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico. Editing a single line of a short poem is difficult organizing a longer manuscript presents its own challenges.
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