I'm a little burnt out with the journals. After a while, there is a certain sameness that seeps in: the white noise of the contemporary that makes it hard to hear yourself thinking above the din. I don't know how journal editors do it, reading lots of poetry like that. Maybe if you do enough of it, you can tune out the noise and hear what's really going on.

Rachel Loden's Richard Nixon Snow Globe has arrived. I wish I'd thought of that title! It's a excellent chapbook with a unified feel to it, and made me think that the chapbook is the form I'd really like to work in. That is, that's the ideal length for reading and writing poetry. Not the 60-80 page "full length" collection. So portable and elegant. It works for Jess Mynes and Rachel Loden (two very different poets needless to say), and I think it would work for me. I can see that there are poets who might feel constrained by this length, that they could not make the case for their poetry in only 25 pages. Maybe I'm just lazy because I have almost 30 pages in a new manuscript and want to bring it to a conclusion.