A Writer's Notebook, Day Eight-Hundred-And--Thirty-Four

I want to begin work on collecting a full volume of my poetry.  The amount of work I have written, I could create several large books, but I am not, at the moment, interested in doing something all encompassing, or even attempt a single volume work of great scale.  Instead, I want to focus on a shorter volume of the more typical length, around one hundred pages, or even less.  This may seem, in some ways, to be a turn from my comments of the past few days, about needing to be more vulnerable in my work, but I think the process of curating work and creating a collection is actually a process that I can use in that effort.  In creating my last chapbook manuscript with Freesia McKee, I found that I was able to bring the work together in a way that opened it up.  A context was created by bringing together various pieces into an assembled whole, allowing the poems to gain meaning through their interactions.  As well, that context provided me a lens for revision, and the result is a piece that I am very proud of, and which I think succeeds as a poetic work.  I think that attempting to organize more work in this way will be an incredible lesson for me, and plan to keep my focus on going deeper and pushing farther.  I think that seeing the work again may provide a real chance for putting those ideas into action, and that doing it in the context of a longer collection will open up other possibilities that I am excited to explore.

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