Increasingly I'm writing in suites or sequences of short poems. The original model for this (in my case at least) is certain medium-length poems by Kenneth Koch. "The Aesthetics of ......" But I want the individual poems to be more differentiated in style and voice and genre. The first poem I wrote in this style was "Sunday Morning," published in The Hat. The next was The Thelonious Monk Fake Book, which was much longer. I'm envisaging a book containing three or four of these mini-books. The next is going to be composed of more lyrical poems, without the prose or the centos mixed in. A little more uniformity of tone, perhaps.

(Come to think of it, I've done this more in the past than realize. I just never thought of it as the organizing principle. And there are other models besides Koch. Spicer and David Shapiro come to mind. However, Kenneth Koch is the number 1 influence on my poetry and always has been. It's not that I think of him as the greatest poet of our period--that might be Frank O'Hara, but Koch is the one I feel closest too myself. Maybe it's the anxious heterosexuality, I don't know. Because I'm most interested in Koch, I don't tend to write poetry that's "difficult." In fact, I think "mainstream" readers would like my work if I could get it out to them, and they could stop reading their damned Louise Gluck for a moment and pay attention. That's why I send poems off to "mainstream" publications. I believe in a sort of immediate emotional pay-off. The intellectuality has to be there too, but mainly in the form of "smartness," sharpness of attitude. I hate versified "ideas.")

I write extremely short poems anyway, but have needed to find a structure intermediate between the very short poem and the 70-page "Book-Length Manuscript." In fact, maybe my next mini-sequence should be called "Book-length Manuscript." NOBODY STEAL THIS TITLE PLEASE: I thought of it first. It's sort of a joke in academia. I don't have a book yet, we say, but I am working on a "book-length manuscript."