The Pure Products

I woke up at night with my cough, as has been happening lately. I have a sinus infection, which explains some of my recent difficulties. Insomnia is rare with me, but I couldn't get back to sleep. I reconstructed WCW's poem "For Elsie" in my mind, almost perfectly. Checking this morning I realize I left out two words "to work in some hard-pressed / house in the suburbs..." I had shortened this phrase to "to some hard pressed / house in the suburbs." I had a conversation about the poem recently with Denise Lowe, former poet laureate of Kansas, and had a slight advantage because I happened to have memorized the poem at some point in my life, and then rememorized it.

Curiously, I think the omission of those two words makes the poem better.

Then I tried to work out a 4 against 7 polyrhythm. I fell asleep before I could solve that one. Mathematically I knew what it had to be, but I couldn't get it to fall into place as a real rhythm, one that I could feel.