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

I think that tomorrow I am going to try and sit down with some of my poetry and begin attempting to select some work for the manuscript I am working on.  As I said, I think that the real key is going to be choosing the work and letting it begin to speak to me.  I know that I want to organize it in a way that is similar to the chapbook manuscript that I did a few years ago, though not precisely like that.  That manuscript is designed so that each poem has a twin, with the sets organized in a way that is intended to provide a journey for the reader.  Specifically, the poems are set up in a sort of parenthetical structure where the first and last poems of the book are connected, as are the second and the second to last, the third and third to last, and so on.  I don't think that particular approach would be right in a longer work, but I think the idea of connecting poems together in an ordered way is a good idea, and my hope is to, once more, craft a journey for the reader.  I think it is also about creating a setting for the poems that becomes something cohesive and synergistic, so that the whole work is not merely a bunch of poems but a collective with qualities that go beyond those of the individual components.

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