A Writer's Notebook, Day Three-Hundred-And-Eight

I feel that I am coming to some new places in my work today.  In some ways, at least.  The two poems I wrote this evening, for example, felt to be in somewhat different mode than much of what I write.  They seemed inside of something, in a way, or maybe closer to the emotional aspects.  Many of my poems carry a certain distance to them, a separation that is maintained through a cold perspective that does not feel invested in the events.  These pieces did something else, and I found it very interesting.  I'm not sure that they are particularly valuable, in the end, but they seem important as movements towards a new space for my work.

These pieces seemed to blend some of the surreal aspects of other poems with a sense of being inside a particular, though not entirely elucidated, world.  I think I was approaching this in some of my previous work, but I felt that something snapped into place here, and I am very excited by it.  In a way, it feels like a new tool in my arsenal.  It is discovering a way of approaching ideas that feels very different than any I was comfortable with previously.

Of course, this is not a new method, or a new idea, but it is a new direction for my work, and I think their may well be aspects of what I discover through that which will yield unique ideas that I could not have come up with in other ways.  At the moment, it is really just the excitement of realizing I am able to go farther afield now, to explore an area that I had not previously looked in, as if I have lived in a house for many years and only now opened a certain door to find another room waiting for me.  In some ways, even writing about it here is a way to make certain I do not lose that excitement, but continue the exploration, not dismissing the idea as something old immediately.

Honestly, it is easy to do that, to drop an idea or technique, even one that felt promising and exciting, but here, I have a sense that it is worth my investing some effort in looking at this more closely.  I think it is a route to something more raw, something true in a way that I have not found yet.  In these poems, I think I was able to bring some of the emotional sensitivity to the work that I have always wrought from a distance.  It felt, in a sense, like I allowed myself to inhabit the work, not just construct it, and that is a very important shift, I think. 

It would be easy to misunderstand what I mean when I say that I have not "inhabited" the work before.  What I mean is that my poems have done much of their work through the use of absence, through a kind of austerity that is intended to create pathos and a sort of haunting effect.  In doing that, I have found ways to minimize my footprints as a writer.  I don't want to seem as emotionally involved as I may be, or to seem to be pressing a certain response, but want the reader to come to a place on their own.  I am sure that much of what I do to achieve that is not strictly necessary, but is how I write, because I know it works towards the kind of impact I want to have in the work.  However, it does require that I remain a bit aloof in the work.  However, I think I may be finding a way to be more present, to enter the work more fully as the writer, but in a way that fits within my aesthetic, and does not lose the things I desire to keep.  In that sense, it feels like it is liberating me to be more present with the reader, to be more direct in ways I wasn't always comfortable with, and I think that will lead to a very different set of new possibilities.  Really, it feels like I am at the beginning, which is kind of an exciting place to be/