North Atlantic Books is proud to announce the publication of Wild Horses, Wild Dreams: New and Selected Poems, 1971-2010 by Lindy Hough, the third title in North Atlantic’s Io Poetry Series, available April 5, 2011 in paperback wherever books are sold.
The process of making a New and Selected Poems has a compilation aspect where you’ve got a lot of footage from older books, then technology is employed to scan the books onto a disk. The new poems are added.  Then the manuscript is carefully edited and proofread, in a few different passes, then the pre-press manuscript is turned into a Quark document and designed—a huge job in itself, but not my job. The author gets to see first proofs and find things, as the editor does, then second, then check the corrections. The four small crowds morphed into a new melon with its own parts, with room having been left for new ones.
These were older books, as they are for most poets or writers who do this, from different eras of my life. I worked to decide which poems would be included—I had twenty per book as a goal, determined by the total page count. But which twenty? It was a hard decision. What if it crept up to twenty-five, or thirty? For a few days I thought I was going to have to get tougher and more arbitrary as it became clear that I was too fond of all of them; after all, they had been the best of the poems of that time, which hadn’t even made it into the book.
I would cut every third poem, and see where that got me. And dated ones—but sometimes those showed the different era, early seventies, late seventies, so obviously that wasn’t a correct criteria. Pure arbitrariness felt wrong. I cut poems which perhaps didn’t hold up, or were more minor in some sense. When I had to get tougher and cut more I looked forward to the space for the new ones, and saved carefully, promising that poem it would not be forgotten.
Visit Hough’s website Lindyhough.com to read the full article.
Lindy Hough is the author of five books of poetry and non-fiction, includingNuclear Strategy and The Code of the Warrior: Faces of Mars and Shiva in the Crisis of Human Survival, a collection of anti-nuclear pieces. She cofounded North Atlantic Books in the early seventies, and was Publisher and Editorial Director for many years. She lives in Berkeley, California .
