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

The aspect of Blaze without Burning that I think brings it together as a collection is the structure that it took on as it developed.  I have probably discussed this before, but the book is built around having sets of poems, but they are not directly next to each other, rather the second half reverses the order from the first, making a sort of mirror, or, as I often think of it, as a kind of journey towards and away from the center of the book.  That structure brought the book together and gave the poems an added dimension through the relationships that exist between them in the text, and I know that I am interested in finding new ways to build on that as I work on a full length collection.  Obviously, I don't want to just repeat that format, but I do think that there is a way I can find to do something similar, and I expect that it will come to me.  I have to remember that the structure for Blaze without Burning only came to be after the work had been selected.  It was in reviewing the work that I started to see the connections that allowed the piece to come together in the way that it has.  I am hopeful that something similar can happen once I have an idea of the poems that I want to include in this new book.

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