The Soul's Refinement was scheduled for publication in 2002, after a lot of dickering to get permissions for quoted material. However Against Holy War preempted it in the schedule. Though I was disheartened and uninterested by the time it came out, I felt I had to follow through with the project so as to fix the quoted materials in their final form, lest I have to subject myself to the rigamarole again at a later date.
Two subsequent books, The Soul's Perpetuation and The Soul's Restitution, follow this book in form, by which time I had decided to leave out quotes, though they remain my favorite feature of this old book. It marked a significant step in my development, setting me up for The Requiem which would follow it, but unsatisfactory in most other respects. Paul Carroll, to whom I had shown an early poem in the collection (before it was a collection), died during the course of its completion, and so I wrote a poem referencing the Mermaid's Tavern for him, a favorite image of his in class of what he imagined heaven to be.
It was also personally noteworthy in that my poem about how much I disliked employment at the Collector's Office in Evanston, got published in The Evanston Beacon, and got me booted:
Two subsequent books, The Soul's Perpetuation and The Soul's Restitution, follow this book in form, by which time I had decided to leave out quotes, though they remain my favorite feature of this old book. It marked a significant step in my development, setting me up for The Requiem which would follow it, but unsatisfactory in most other respects. Paul Carroll, to whom I had shown an early poem in the collection (before it was a collection), died during the course of its completion, and so I wrote a poem referencing the Mermaid's Tavern for him, a favorite image of his in class of what he imagined heaven to be.
It was also personally noteworthy in that my poem about how much I disliked employment at the Collector's Office in Evanston, got published in The Evanston Beacon, and got me booted:
