A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-Three-Hundred-And-SIxty-Three

I've been thinking quite a lot about poetry and how to discuss it, how to communicate the aspects of poetry that I think are most interesting or important, and most of that, in the end, is just discovered by reading poems and being open to them.  As a poet, I do think about craft and the ways poems are constructed, and how to do a better job of making poems that work and do what I am hoping they will.  For me, much of that is connected to understanding the ways in which language works, the process of comprehension itself, as much as I can at least.  Those aspects are often more difficult to discuss, not only because much of what I understand in that area has become largely intuitive, but also because it often wouldn't seem interesting or meaningful, would seem so minor a detail as to not matter, and I guess that much of what makes any piece of writing poetry is connected to the kind of obsessiveness over such minute aspects of language and communication.  It is not that every poet thinks about the same things or is interested in using their language in the same ways as every other poet, but that we are all searching for the way to make the language do more of whatever it is going to be asked to do.