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

I am going to keep this rather short tonight, as it is getting late and I'm tired.  I've written my five poems for the evening, as well as the work on this blog, and just want to get myself ready for bed.  It can be draining to keep doing this each night, but I know it is important, even if I don't always feel that great about the individual poems.  I don't know if anything I wrote tonight has merit, but I am glad I didn't just blow off the effort.  It can be tempting to not do the work, and I have, at least once or twice, skipped out on things without it being a problem, but I know the importance of sustaining this effort.  It is not about the individual writing sessions but about maintaining my practice.  While a poem is, of course, a result of a specific effort, I know, as well, that any individual piece of writing owes itself to the larger context, both in the direct sense that I am writing as a result of this committed stance, and in a less concrete way as a result of all I have written before and as a manifestation of the practice itself.  I don't write daily because I think each piece will be a great work of art, but because I know that, for me, it takes doing the work each day to maximize the potential for that work to emerge.

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