A Writer's Notebook, Day Seven-Hundred-And-Fifty-Nine

 I am finding that I am really needing to do a lot of writing at the moment to satisfy myself.  It may well be that I was in a down period and now am restored and finding my long period of pressing to do more and more has altered my creative output in a deeper way.  I am not writing at the same frenzied peak, but I think I have written close to ten poems today, and I also worked on my fiction.  What is more, I am finding that the work seems to be growing and improving.  I am able to consider very specific aspects in ways that would not have occurred to me at one point, and am discovering new ideas and directions all the time.

One aspect of this is in terms of my understanding of creating a collection, or, as I am considering it in my current mode, creating a larger composite work that integrates those pieces.  The goal, I am finding, is not only to place the work together, but to use the connections within it to elevate the pieces individually while creating something far more substantial as well.  In doing this, I am guided by a strange duality, because I want to, in one sense, deform the book, reshape it from that expected linearity into something more complex, but I am also not wanting to do this with a physical alteration, or by some strange logic of page hopping.  I want the linear reading experience to remain in the physical sense, but to alter the shape of the book in a more profound, ideological sense.  That does not make sense without an example, but consider the idea that a book is designed with repetition in the structure, where elements repeat in ways that are clearly organizational, that the book begins and then back-tracks the same course that was already taken.  Again, it is not entirely clear, and that is partly a result of these ideas being new, being a thing I stumbled upon and have been exploring to understand and build upon.  Consider the idea of a novel where the book is too diaries, for example, and one goes backwards from an event, then the second starts going forwards.  Consider how this sets the beginning of the book as the center of it, with the ends at the edges.  That is a bit of the concept, at least in a simple form, but I am conceiving of this in terms that are less narrative and more divergent.  

As an approach for developing a poetry collection, I believe it has a lot of potential, especially when I am dealing with the inclusion of work that is already in need of revision and structuring.  In the context of this kind of larger work, it becomes clear to me what is needed at times, as the context of the poem is its connection with other pieces in the work, and thus I can see what themes and elements are worth developing and exploring, what is to be reflected in this piece that might connect with other facets present throughout the work.  Their is something that I have found very exciting and magical in terms of creating a work in this way, as it has opened up an avenue for exploring what each piece is within a new realm, and provides me a larger canvas than the individual pieces.  It is, I think, connected to my writing so much, in that my focus has grown as well, not only to think of the poem itself, but of the body of work being presented as a singular entity.