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

 I am doing well in terms of getting that chapbook organized.  I did quite a bit of work on it tonight and am getting close to having the draft ready.  I am certain, once I have it together, I will have other work to do, as I am yet to see the full piece assembled, which will change it, I am certain.  My goal in crafting this collection is, as I have said, to make a cohesive experience, to bind the poems together in a way that makes it feel as if they are of a whole.  In order to do this, I am creating a sort of ghost narrative by assembling the work from poems that all gesture towards similar events, and weaving the interconnections that make it clear their is a progression through the pieces.  In many ways, I am thinking of it more as akin to the way a piece of music can seem to convey a sense of narrative, even if it is not clear in terms of the details.  I suppose it is more accurate to call it a journey rather than a narrative, but I am not meaning a story or plot, more the sense of a through-line and a movement to a destination.   In doing this, I have been using titles as a major tool, since I often wind up writing poems and waiting to add a title until later.  In this case, it happens that all the poems had yet to be given titles, so I found ways to create titles that connect specific poems together, in order to make subtle aspects of the construction easy to recognize.  What is quite interesting is that I am attempting to do this in a way that involves creating titles that change in reference to different perspectives and poems, so that the same title can reappear in a way that is intended to change what the title means, and thus allows the second poem to, I hope, change the impact of the first poem.  I am not certain that it is working, to be honest, though I am finding it an interesting challenge, and it has me considering aspects of my work I do not usually focus on, which is quite helpful, but I cannot say, yet, that the titles are effective.  I think that the key is in discovering a context and a central image that can apply to both pieces, but which has a very different symbolic meaning in the second poem, a meaning that is less literal and more complicated so that the reader will recontextualize the first poem as a result.  I think that, if I am successful, this approach may be one I want to explore further, especially as I know the way some other poets have played with ideas similar to this in recent work, though with very different techniques.

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