Oh Give Me a Poem Where the Buffalo Roam: Everyday Magic, Day 804

Like all book projects to the easily-optimistic, this one seemed kind of easy and fun. Fun it was, but “easy” quickly became a complicated term. I had many blog posts about my poet laureate time, but there was the work of transforming them into chapters, finessing words and paragraphs, and “killing darlings” (the writerly term for letting go of passages we’re attached to). I also thought the book wouldn’t be nearly so interesting without greater context, so I brought in some travelogue writing to give readers a sense of some of the communities I traversed, and best of all, poems from many gracious writers near and far. In the end, the book’s fishing expedition for Kansas poems (with excursions for poet laureate poems from other states) brought over 40 poems to bunk down in various chapters.

Then, of course, there are all the necessary tasks to turn a manuscript into a book, including finding a good cover image (thanks, Stephen Locke, for your