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

It is always a bit strange to go back through work, not only in the ways I mentioned last night, but also in the sense that I am writing so much, I don't recognize so much of the work directly.  It is more than just not remembering every single poem, but even more, as I look at groups of poems that were composed at the same time, it is clear that they are part of a poetic phase I don't recall.  I mean to say, they seem to be exploring modes of work that I moved through, but which I don't fully recall.  Often, I am playing in different ways as I write, and it is not all that hard to understand how trends can arise, patterns of interest or exploration that follow certain possibilities within my writing and focus on certain modes and topics.  These can take many shapes, of course, but they are not usually a conscious decision.  In most cases, I just find an obsession arises that plays out for a time.  In the end, I move on, but that is not to say that their isn't change or learning, only that the centrality of a certain idea within my work has faded.  The tools that I've honed through that work remain within me, but I may not recall the process itself.  In looking back, especially when I can do it with a focus on the poems in a temporal context, I see these periods in the work that I hadn't been aware of consciously, or have forgotten over time.  It can be very interesting, and it is a good distraction, at times, and seeing it through the lens of process and development has been helping me to see the work in a way that removes some of the difficulties of facing my own work.