In one of your previous posts you mentioned that you’d heard Saul Williams is about to come out with a book titled Chorus, and you were wondering about possibly changing the title of your own book in light of that. Thinking about that just now, it occurred to me that Choruses, just making it plural, might work as well as a title. I mention this here since it apparently floated up out of the mist as I’m sitting here typing this.

What you said here about — when you were younger — having felt a tendency to try to put everything into a single poem, the history, the colonialism, the resistance, etc., brought to mind something I read once years ago in an interview with Bob Dylan. He was talking about his song “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and he said that he wrote the song in October 1962 during the awful days of military staredown between the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union over the presence of nuclear missiles in Cuba, when much of the world was holding its breath wondering if the confrontation would go over the brink and the unforgettable fire would incinerate the world.

Dylan said that as he was writing the song, he kept having the feeling that every line he wrote might be the last one, could be the last moment of his life and of every life on earth (and during those days that wasn’t an exaggeration). So he tried to put as much into every line as he possibly could, to try to say everything in every single line.

Might not work as a general approach to writing all poems, though Dylan did write a pretty good song…