Jim Leftwich and Peter Ganick turned me in a different direction a couple years ago. Leftwich's Doubt, 1st of all. a 500 page book of prose. Doubt is a labour, a muscular chewing of language. the sentence are well formed if complex, but the vocabulary is stern and meaty, also resistant. one reads with a stiff music in one's ear and a hunger to see thru langauge to some point of light. when I saw the book, I was taken simply by its length, that a writer had gone to the trouble. had the same feeling when I saw Making of Americans. I wanted to write that long. does a writer need any further aim in mind, when beginning? I didn't. I began something that ended up with the title Days Poem. close to 800 pages in Word. tiny bits of it were published online by Jack Kimball at The East Village: voici. Peter Ganick is almost relentless with long and very long works. I think I am taken with the novelist's method of daily writing, serial production. Leftwich and Ganick sent me trying expanse. partly, I got tired of trim morsels of poems. I wanted a larger context. a reason I haven't pursued magazine publicaion: just showing off a few of my latest nifties hasn't much meaning for me. one writing adventure I had was writing two things at once. my vision, but I've never attempted to create the manuscript, was to haven't one of these works on the odd numbered pages, adn the other on the even. I wrote them as simultaneously as I could, always went from one to the other. and I tried to keep the length of each similar, so that their facing page format remained. it occurs to me that I could prepare a pdf of this. really I don't know a simple way to make the manuscript. by the way, I found a small free program cfalled Cute Printer that can create pdf fiiles. you print to file, and get something that Acrobat can read. I've made a few booklets out of texts that I've found online, it's pretty cool.