Ah, a new year! I am revising today, and cleaning the house a bit, and making chicken salad.

Maybe sorting laundry. The trouble with housework is, no matter how often you do it, it's never done.

Same things with poetry. I was going through chapbooks last night (the little ones I sell at readings) and fixing errors, then revisiting whole poems and juggling passages.

A few poems (very few) I let stand. Not so much I think them perfect, but I can't see anything at this moment that would improve the whole.

My mother used to cut my bangs when I was a kid. She'd trim, look, trim a little more, comb, trim a little more, and eventually I'd have a quarter-inch line of hair across my forehead. It was not a good look for me. What she didn't think about is with my eye being so much smaller on the left side of my face, there was no way a straight-line bang situation was going to look right. She needed to look at ME, not try to make my face look like someone else's. It took me years to learn that, and a very talented stylist.

My poems are the same. I have to fix them according to what they are trying to say, not what might suit someone else.

Of course, I'm revising because I have nothing new to say right now. Even in this new year.