A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-Four-Hundred-And-Seventy

I have been slowly building towards compiling a full length collection of poetry, and I am starting to have a good sense about what I really want to do with it, how I want to approach the process.  So much of it, for me, is about putting the work into conversation so that the collection becomes a book and not just a pile of poems, and for me, much of that is about finding ways to connect the work, to organize it in more than just the basic sense of placing the pieces in order, but providing elements that make it feel cohesive and in conversation with itself.  The thing is, that has to happen as the result of a process, as a part of selecting and revising the work, finding the places where different poems connect, and in developing the book into a setting for each individual piece.  That is not something that happens by contemplation alone.  It comes from digging into the process, and I think I need to start getting more serious about that.  Really, there is something a bit intimidating about that, considering just how much poetry I have composed in the last several years.  Even so, having so much to choose from is probably, in the end, a good problem to have.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Writer's Notebook, Day Three-Hundred-And-Sixty-Five

One of my teachers, the late poet Thomas Lux, was fond of pointing out that writing and publishing are two different things.  He stressed the need for a writer to focus on the work itself, not on the building of a career or the accumulation of publishing credits and other accolades.  Those things are not what a writer should be working towards, he would say, but instead the focus needs to be upon the craft.  He once expressed to me his belief that great work will always find a way into the world, even if it is after the artist has died.  Emily Dickinson is, of course, a prime example of this, though far from the only one.  That is a fine way to think about these things, but, and Lux also acknowledged this, to have a career as a writer requires doing all that other work. I tend to think that the writing itself is an important act on its own, having nothing to do with whether the work finds an audience immediately or not, and the publishing aspect as more of an ...
Read more

A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-And-Forty-Five

I have been thinking about narrative point of view quite a bit lately.  One thing that always fascinates me is considering how the early novels were all written such that the narrative was diegetic to the text.  That is to say, the text that conveyed the story was something which was said to exist within the world of the story itself in some form.  In  Pamela, for example, Richardson employs the use of an epistolary form, allowing the reader to see the existence of the text itself as an artifact of the tale.  Now, this is very different than many modern stories in which we accept reading words that reflect the mind of a character as it exists in the moment.  Faulkner's stream of consciousness is a clear example of this distinction, but even many works of genre fiction rely on our accepting reading a narrative that by its nature cannot and does not exist within the text.  I think there is a great deal more to consider in this, but I am just beginning my...
Read more

A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-And-Fifty-Nine

I have been thinking about how I can discuss certain aspects of my poetry and the choices I make as a writer.  In particular, I tend to write without as much reliance on sensory details and descriptions, instead choosing more abstract depictions.  This is something that I know many writers would call an odd choice, as specificity seems inherently to demand the application of detail, but I tend to be a bit hesitant about relying on depictions that utilize the senses, as I find that approach somewhat problematic.  For one thing, sensory description is always going to be less than universal, and not only because of the reality that there are individuals who lack one or more sense.  In many ways, for me, the deeper problem is one related to language itself.  Our use of language creates our experiences in a very real way, though I can't necessarily offer a full explanation of what I mean by that right here, but using a word for an object bestows qualities on it....
Read more