A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-One-Hundred-And-Fifty-One

I need to select the poems I am going to use for my one-on-one meeting with Nickole Brown.  These meetings are always something I value a great deal, and that makes it even more difficult to choose only ten poems.  I have to spend a few days looking and thinking about it, but I am sure I can figure it out.  The thing is, I am torn, because I want to demonstrate my work in a real way, but I also know that I want guidance on poems that are not working yet, that I can feel are off.  If I already believed them to be at the point of perfection, I wouldn't be asking for help.  I think, my goal is to always pick the poems whose aspirations and intent feel the highest, the poems I most want to get right, but which are also, still, not reaching their aims, at least to me.  I am sure that spending a bit of time looking back through my poems will help me decide, it is just that I find looking over the work difficult at times.  I have heard some actors discuss not watching their own performances on film, and I think it is similar, but, as a writer, I have to look over the work at times, and need to discern what to do.  The hardest aspect of that revision process is not getting stuck, refining when the work is "good enough."  In many ways, that is what is important about having the guidance of others who can see the work from outside.  When the person is also both a brilliant writer and teacher as well, that is a major boon.  What makes working with Nickole truly important to me is that she is also the person who was willing to give me the straight dope and tell me to get to work in a real way.  She cut through and pushed me to do the work I am doing now, and I am always grateful for her willingness to take that risk.  If I am honest, while I was writing and working, I wasn't pushing myself in the way I have been, and I know it was a conversation with Nickole which changed that.

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