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

So much of the time as a poet, I find myself circling around the same ideas.  This is a normal state, I think, and much in line with a comment by Stanley Kunitz to the effect that all poets have around two poems, that everything else is variations on those pieces.  There are things which feel impossible to communicate well, but which must be said, and finding the way to get it out, to make it a thing that can be shared, that is often the goal that a poem seeks to fulfill.  These ideas do not disappear, though, they remain, haunting the mind and needing to be let free, perhaps because it seems as if a previous effort was not right, or because some new perspective has emerged or another aspect of what is there, or just because the underlying ideas have come back into mind.  It can be odd to find oneself caught in these orbits, and it can feel a bit obsessive at times, most certainly in the context of one who writes as much as I tend to, as it is quite easy to fall into a rhythm, churning out several poems that attempt to extract some particular mental apparition.  It can feel like being stuck, and, at times, I wonder about whether this or that subject is becoming too much, or if my work is just repetitive and not moving forwards.  This can be upsetting, but, I tend to think those fears would exist even if I didn't have any awareness of these kinds of repetitions in my work.  Even more, as I said above, this is natural for a poet.  I can think of many examples of artists choosing to do very specific kinds of work for a whole career, creating things that are repetitive of previous work on a certain level, but which still seem to evolve over their career, and poetry has a similar potential.  This is not to say that I want to exclusively focus on one or another kind of poem or specific piece, but I can imagine a poet doing something of that sort and it being a very interesting and rewarding body of work.  Poets tend to have obsessions of one sort or another.  Read a poets work and you will notice that most have a specific body part that appears all the time in their work (mine are hands), as a small example.  In these small ways, they become just a part of the poetic identity, a bit of the background, as with that nebulous necessity, voice, (some might even consider such predilections an aspect of voice, but that is a whole different set of arguments, perhaps for another night).  When it becomes larger, it feels quite different, and that, for me, can become uncomfortable, but is that a bad thing?  As I spoke of in a previous entry, the act of writing is a primary way that I improve in my work, so it is quite natural to want to return to what is important again, to do better with it, to go deeper or find a greater clarity of communication.  It can be rewarding, is rewarding, of course, to take on new kinds of work, but so too, there is a great deal to be found in returning to previous ideas for more.  What was known before remains, and with that established, much more can often be discovered.