A Writer's Notebook, Day Two-Hundred-And-Seventy-One

I have four new poems today, and three of them are, I think, very good drafts.  They are also poems that really pushed me in ways.  One is a sort of prose poem that has a kind of Borgesian quality to it.  It is intended to read as a fragment from an article concerning the discovery of journals relating a strange and ill-fated exploratory expedition in the New World.  The concept had been in my head for some time, and it took me a bit of time to really get my head around it.  Certain ideas still need to settle, really, but I know some work I want to do on that piece already.  Another piece was a continuance of the series of surreal animal fables that I keep coming up with.  While I consider those pieces to be serial, they are all of very different styles and tones, and this one shifts to a new area, in a way.  At least, it feels that it is in a different tenor to me.  The last piece was another that had been in my head for some time, but which was rather difficult to know just how to get right, as it concerned a sort of philosophical conception that goes in a strange direction.  It needed to be done with a light touch in order for it to work, really, and I think I got that right.  The nature of the piece is such that it had to work in a certain way or it would be pointless.  If it does work, as I think it does, the end of the poem packs a certain punch that is borne out of the fact that it is a conclusion not stated but clear, and one that is connected to ideas that are usually taken in a very different way.  It has to do with some heavy ideas, and I am not keen to get into the specifics here, but I think it works in a certain way.

It really has been a very stressful day in other ways, but I am very glad to have gotten my work done.  I am still hoping I can push myself up in terms of writing a poem or two more each day, and I think a big key to that is in the morning.  In recent days, I have found that the morning is not always as easy for me, so I often don't write more than one piece at that time, and I then do a lot more writing at night. I am in my third or fourth session tonight, right as I write this, as I spent time working on the poems I mentioned above, and took a bit of time between writing in some cases, so I could recharge a bit and think.  If I can motivate myself a bit more tomorrow morning, I might be able to do a bit more work.  I shouldn't even worry if all I do in the morning is two or three things that are just me filling paper, because the point is the habit of writing and that practice will pay off.  In that time, I can be doing real work, but it will first have to become more natural for me to consistently do the work.  Just the same basic thing but in another way, really, and now, at least, I know how to get the work done.

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