A Writer's Notebook, Day Two-Hundred-And-Sixty-Nine

I stopped, again, at three poems today, but I did have at least one that felt closer to the work I want to be doing, and in some ways felt a bridge between a few different areas of the work I've been doing lately.  I'm often finding that the work is sort of interweaving in a way, where different threads of work come together.  For example, I've had a lot of poems of late that are sort of surrealistic animal fables, of a sort, and I have had other work that seems to be about the idea of finding the world slightly off kilter in some way, or seeing something that is sort of strange and perhaps uncanny or magical, maybe.  In one poem today, those two concepts sort of came together in a way that I hadn't explored before.  It is like a nexus between two different aspects of my recent work.

I'm not sure that is a thing that will continue, or that I will find other work of this particular sort, but it feels good to me that I have work which can bridge that space, as it allows me to formulate a sequence that moves from one to the other in a more seamless way.  There are other poems that I've written recently which did the same kind of weaving or cross-pollinating, but with different sets of concepts.  For example, I have another animal fable, very different from the poem tonight, but which is tonally, thematically, and structurally similar to certain other work, and acts as a sort of bridge of a sort their as well.  Not everything is about animals in my work, of course, but a lot of my recent work has featured a lot of animals, really.  I am not sure why it is, but I think it might actually become the basis for a series or maybe even a whole book at some point.  Thinking about, I've written poems with animals at previous times, but that has become a major preoccupation within my work lately.  That is, I think, a good thing at the moment, as it is giving me a lot of material and ways to find new ideas.  Indeed, often, if I am a bit stuck, I can actually consider a new idea just by thinking what animal I want to play with.  Not all those ideas come together, really, but many do, and I find a lot of the work is really interesting.

That is not all of the work I am engaged in right now, of course.  Writing as many pieces as I am, I've got a number of areas of work.  Some are overtly political, though I'm finding that is often the hardest for me to get going with.  It takes a certain mental state, and I am not always there.  It is important work, though, and I want to engage in it more.  I have some deeper philosophical poems, where I am sort of thinking and wrestling with certain ideas.  I've got some personal/confessional style work, though that is not my primary focus, honestly.  Really, it is often something I do to just sort of get the ideas out of my system.  In a similar way, I've a lot of poems about writing at present, many of which are just junk, really, but they are the kinds of things that I can see myself looking at as a collection later, and using as the basis for something in conjunction (I have probably discussed this idea before).  In many ways, what I might want to do at some point soon is organize some of this work into categories and see what I really have...

Anyhow, I am feeling that, though I did a smaller number of poems today than intended, I did get a good amount of real work done in what I did write, and am somewhat happy about that outcome.  I still intend to push myself further, and I actually have a couple of ideas brewing for the morning, so I should be in good shape to start out.