In Which I Discover My Poet Self Likes the Word Snug

I'm tired this morning, but it's a pleasant tiredness.  I spent yesterday afternoon organizing a variety of files, copying files from one computer to another so that I could print them.  In the late afternoon/early evening, we walked to our friends' house, where we enjoyed yummy appetizers and good wine.  We talked about our all-time favorite writers, and which presidential candidates seemed most like ones you'd want to have a beer with.  Although I would not want to have a beer with Nixon, I confessed my sympathy for Richard Nixon, the Richard Nixon of 1960, not the one of 1972.  I came home and crashed into sleep, where I dreamed of a huge party I was giving for strangers in our new house, but we were out of food, and the place was lit only by candles, and I was afraid of fire.

What better mindset to read the new manuscript of poems?

I wanted to read the manuscript from beginning to end, in one sitting, and now, I have.  I like the way the poems swirl around some of the same themes and images:  nuclear stuff, the rising seas, the difficulty of modern work, monastery stuff, religious images.  I think I have it all balanced.

I need to re-think one image.  In poem after poem, people return to snug houses, snug cottages, snug condos.  Too much repetition of the word snug.  Now to determine which poem gets the word.  And should I try to develop other ways of suggesting that snugness?  Could I have a tightly tucked cottage? Hmm.  I'll let these ideas percolate.

There's also several times where things rise like incense rising in a chapel, prayers rising in a chapel, like smoke wafting to rafters.  I'm not sure that repetition leaps out the way the adjective "snug" does.

I'm startled by how many typos remain.  I really thought I had caught all of those.

And I would not have thought the word "snug" would be one that I would overuse.