And I have left you waiting. I've tried to post regularly. This was a special circumstance. Friday, after work, I bought two bottles of wine and set off for my editors home. I carried the proof copies of 6 books. Well, to be honest it was 4 proofs & two editors copies. I'm a causal writer so I figured we would get through the four & leave the other two for at least a week of study & tearing apart. I wasn't too far off. Over six hours & two bottles, I was pacing myself, we did the proofing. Then my editor's other got home. We split a bottle of whisky. As you might imagine I hold political views at odds with most folk who write poetry these days. Not that common politics would have sped the proofing, but it might have exposed their daughter to less raised vices. My editor & I have never agreed on politics. The best thing is that we both love words. They mean things. When you say them aloud or set them to the page they can never be taken back. Oh, you might try to explain our further elaborate, but without some capitulation, some admission of wrong done those words are yours to own. After several hours of listening to us go back & forth between weighing words & rhymes & trading the kind of insults only afforded to friends their 12 year old asked why we kept coming back to talk about things that we clearly had no common ground on. There was no disagreement here. We all said aloud something on the lines of "The poetry comes first. After that it's the friendship we've forged in the writing & studying. After that we don't have to agree to disagree because we know that we can spend the rest of the time learning from each other." Sometimes I don't agree with my editor about how a line should be written or when I should curse to make a dramatic point. Most of the time we struggle to find common ground politically. There has never been a time when I would ever trade what we have for anything else.