Charles Jensen | Writer

It’s been over a year now since I started writing the flurry of poems that collected into my first manuscript, the one from which my chapbook budded.

In that time, the manuscript itself has gone through (now) 11 revisions.

11 rounds of major changes: reordering, restructuring, and revising individual pieces. And every time it gets a little bit better.

This last time I took out an entire sequence of short pieces that were spread throughout the first two sections. They just weren’t doing enough work. I took out a poem in the first section and put two others on probation. One of those two was then heavily revised (and yay! I discovered what that poem was really supposed to be about) and the other might get a pink slip.

It’s hard to continually revise. I find the more I involve myself in my past work, the less I like it. And that’s odd for me because I can eat at Chipotle every day and not get tired of it…