You're very right. I was actually just reading the piece on revision/how modernism spawned revision as we know it (you posted that, right?) and I came across the Pound poem and a) I thought maybe I should try editing down "Any Body" and seeing where I could go with it, and b) I felt like Pound was spot-on. I'd read the poem before but I hadn't connected the two until yesterday.

Thanks, I'm glad you liked them.

Haha. OK, so the 200 person poetry group is a subreddit. It's mostly a dead subreddit, it was created as an alt to r/poetry, because people like to complain about how r/poetry sucks. (It's actually one of two subreddits I am a part of that were created as reactions to r/poetry.) The thing is, though, everyone's willing to complain about how much r/poetry sucks (due to lack of critique, not polished work, or whatever) but not a lot of people are willing to put in the effort to fix it. After all, it's a lot of work. Hell, I'm a shit mod for my subreddit which I am not even going to name because I don't want to be embarrassed. I was roped in as a mod by the guy who DID create the subreddit and asked to be as active as possible (while protesting I probably couldn't be very active). For a while it seemed to work, just like the OTHER poetry subreddit I'm a part of (which is private). Unfortunately though it requires a lot of sustained effort over an extended period of time and I just haven't the juice, really, to keep posting and responding to poems just to have people a) ignore my feedback b) get offended by my feedback c) take feedback and then not pass it on. For every person giving feedback there's like 5 or 10 new poems submitted.

So, no, I didn't create it, just a mod, and I wouldn't be too excited about it if I were you. It's like being a mod of r/poetry...yes, it's "active" in that people submit and sometimes comment, and subscribe too I guess...but I don't put a lot into it. I'm mostly burnt out on it, really.

I love Zeno's Paradox(es). I actually like to go to Wiki and read through their page of paradoxes. That's how I found Zeno's, actually.

So, I don't know, really. I guess I'll talk more about how I kind of wrote these three poems and maybe that'll be a good starting place.

All three of these poems are part of a book I just finished writing a month or two ago called "Grotesques." I didn't set out to write a book but I noticed a lot of the poems I was writing were following this common theme of, well, grotesquery, and I decided to strike while the iron was hot and try and write as many poems along this theme-line as I could and see where I could go with it. A few other of my poet friends were writing books at the time or had enough material to be writing books and I kind of wanted to give it a try too. So I started just trying to write about terrible things. Some were personal, some weren't. And, as you can see with "Any Body," not all of them were necessarily terrible.

When I sit down to write a poem I don't know where it's going at the end, that's for sure. I didn't know where "Fan Death" was going at the first, I just wrote out that first line, and then I was like "well, _refugee_, what about fan death? What about those crazy people that think that leaving fans on at night will kill them?" So I went with that, and then with each line I guess I got more of an idea of what the poem was about. It's kind of like I winnow down what the poem is about as I continue with it; like each line becomes a choice in the topic. By the time you get to the line about the shack in Florida, really what I was pushing for was just some specificity; a lot of workshops in college have taught me that people love specificity so sometimes I'm just like "here let me try to get REALLY SPECIFIC". And then it evolved. I was driving for something terrible, and I figured out what it could be.

Once I write a poem I definitely edit it. Usually I can edit it a few times right away, sometimes that's for minor stuff like meter or "what makes sense." Then I put it away, and I guess at that point it becomes a series of "Let me put this away and then look at it again" over ever-widening cycles of time. When I'm done with a poem it's not necessarily because I'm happy with it, but because I simply can't figure out what to change any more. Sometimes it just becomes a mess of words and I look at it and I can't see anything good and I can't see anything bad. Sometimes at the end I'm really happy with it. Usually, to be honest, most of my affection for a poem has been beaten out through the editing process and I just look at the poem and can't rate it on any scale any more (if that makes sense).

In closing, if I am honest again, Zeno's Paradox is my favorite poem of the 3. I think I am at the point with "Fan Death" where I can't tell if it's good or crap any more. However, the reception on that one has been really positive, so I will take what is given :)

Not ignoring you, just trying to think more about it before I get back to you, lil . Might be a longish post.