A Writer's Notebook, Day Seven-Hundred-And-Forty-Four

I continued working on the chapbook collection I mentioned yesterday.  The poems are, individually, ready, but the collection as a whole still needs a bit of work to bring it into unity.  As I mentioned, the work is organized in a way that is intended to create a kind of mirroring between the two halves of the book, and so I am working to create connections between the pieces using the titles and small changes, primarily to the formatting of the poems.  In many ways, this piece reflects my writing process over the last several years, in that I was writing so much for so long, I often felt free to write many poems that meditated on similar subjects.  I did not worry about the focus of an individual poem, as I knew it was only a small piece of the work, and as a result, I have a great deal of work that meditates on similar ideas from different perspectives.  The poems in this collection are all products of that, so, while they were not written with this particular approach in mind, their are parallels that became apparent in looking at the work.  This is, I think, quite backwards from how many such pieces are formed, but is an organic outgrowth of the work I have been doing, reflecting the mental obsessiveness that often infects the work.  The most difficult aspect of writing so many poems is often having ideas for them, so it is not surprising that in writing so many, I explored the same ideas over and over at times.  As a result, I have a great deal of work that is inter-nested, and where certain thematic elements and ideas are easily carried across from one piece to another.  These qualities were present in the work, but I am hoping that the creation of a more cohesive structure for the work will make those qualities even clearer, and will help to make the work as a whole a cohesive and potent experience for readers.

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