These were older books, as they are for most poets or writers who do this, from different eras of my life. I worked to decide which poems would be included—I had twenty per book as a goal, determined by the total page count.  But which twenty? It was a hard decision. What if it crept up to twenty-five, or thirty? For a few days I thought I was going to have to get tougher and more arbitrary as it became clear that I was too fond of all of them; after all, they had been the best of the poems of that time, which hadn’t even made it into the book.

I would cut every third poem, and see where that got me. And dated ones—but sometimes those showed the different era, early seventies, late seventies, so obviously that wasn’t a correct criteria. Pure arbitrariness felt wrong.  I cut poems which perhaps didn’t hold up, or were more minor in some sense. When I had to get tougher and cut more I looked forward to the space for the new ones, and saved carefully, promising that poem it would not be forgotten.

These poems in the separate books had the identity of not just themselves, but their book, kind of a family. Changing Woman, Psyche, The Sun In Cancer and Outlands & Inlands— each were a world of a book. The pulled poems just stood alone, bereft, a smaller crowd giving off a faint scent of the book they were emigrating from. They were in search of a country, but weren’t going to give up their own country completely. They couldn’t go to one another’s country, Changing Woman’s poems to Psyche? No no no! That wasn’t the project. They all needed a whole new country.

Then there were prose poems, which looked or were stories. Keep them, or put them in a book of short stories? Would I ever do that, or would said future book demand more recent work, not these much older stories? Perhaps I would slip them in, I thought. But to remove all of them, wouldn’t that wreck what that book had tried to be?  But perhaps that’s what we were doing—declaring these out of print books an edifice for the wrecking-ball. I made different decisions with all three poetry books. I left as much prose as possible in, partly to show that from the beginning I was on a journey to prose.

Psyche had its own world of problems. It was a long narrative poem. It was obvious that the whole thing couldn’t be printed, so I took only three of the six books. I hope for Psyche to be printed in its entirety one day. From all the books I kept the work that wasn’t going to be used in various own files, so at least they’re scanned and one wouldn’t have to start from scratch.

The technology imposed its own wildness. Lines are broken and merged when scanning poetry. I needed the help of our Art Director, my old friend Paula Morrison to find the way to move up lines a certain number of units with the Formatting Pallet. Then I had the help of journalist Evan Karp to help me with this in each volume.

Finally, WHWD was in a file: its editor, Jon Goodspeed, could edit it (in the way that poetry is edited, which is not much, but mainly looking for inconsistencies and oddities). I edited the poems much more, catching repetition, sometimes cutting a line. (It’s okay! No one comes to behead you.)

I read several iterations of proofs. Then it went to design, the large work of Paula, which made it beautiful. She had all kinds of issues to solve: consistent spacing, margins and layout questions, fonts and type questions. They pulled the back cover together, and we all proofread every part of the cover, back cover and spine.

I had relived the emotional and intellectual issues of each era. I could remember perfectly the house, town, setting of the poems; who was around and what we talked about. The poems so clearly breathed the life of the different eras, it was easy to fall into thinking about how the seventies is different from the nineties and this decade of the 21^st century for the culture and our own life.

A scrapbook is similar—something I’ve also been engaged in for my own children, as my mother was for my sisters and me: our childhood photos and mementoes from birth to marriage. And then she made a scrapbook for herself, the best of them all. One sister has the original; the other two have Xeroxes.

I’m grateful to the people mentioned above who helped me so much. I’m pleased that not only are these earlier poems from their books not completely gone from public memory, but they’ve lived rather vibrantly in my own mind in the last eight months. They now have a second life—and the new poems get to be in a book, in this beautiful volume to be published April 5, 2011.