A Writer's Notebook, Day Eight-Hundred-And-Twenty-Five

I am finding it difficult to begin writing tonight.  I know I want to continue on with my considerations of the discussion I had with Nickole Brown yesterday, but I am finding it difficult to do so.  The discussion we had was focused on my poems, but she pointed out things in the work that are very deep and real, and which reverberate in other ways for me in my life.  One of the central things that came up was her sense that many of my poems are withholding something, and I recognize this guardedness.  She pointed out that many of the pieces do not have a great deal of embodiment, and are lacking in materiality, in viscera, are lacking "stuff."  "Put more stuff in your poems," she told me, meaning it in a literal sense: that my poems need items in them.  In part, I think this is all a mechanism of hiding, of hoping to rely on the parts of me that I am least ashamed of.  As a boy, I often found my emotionality to be disparaged, and I think this caused me to discount some of it in a way, at least in terms of my writing.  I need to unblock an aspect of myself and allow it on the page.  Much of the writing I have done is very intellectual, and that is a strength, but it needs to work in concert with other qualities, so that it creates an experience for the reader which is not only mental, but also embodied as an experience.  In some ways it is a frightening arena to enter for me, and that is, I think, a good thing, a sign I am reaching towards something of value that deserves to be brought to light.  I think I am reaching towards aspects of myself that have been neglected, and which I have been afraid to expose, but I need to remember that those fears were born in a different age, when I was not who I am now, and I already know many things that version of me was wrong about.  I trust Nickole's advice in terms of the work, and it had a profound impact on me before, and I am glad to feel that I am moving forwards once more due to her guidance, though I am not certain she recognized just how deep a vein she had struck.

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