A Writer's Notebook, Day Four-Hundred-And-Eighteen

In many ways, I feel that my poetry has recently made some interesting progress.  I do not know, if I am honest, whether the individual poems stand up, but I know that the work is going in new directions.  Experimentation is always important, and finding that I am exploring new ideas of how a poem can work is a very positive sign.  I have, of course, had periods in which I was writing a great many poems with similar qualities, and those periods can be quite important, especially in learning a particular lesson or discovering how one technique works.  But, I also have to admit that I am sometimes a bit stifled with that kind of focus.  I think I have mentioned this before, at times when I have been in a rut, commenting about how I would like to stop writing so much about one thing, or using one particular approach.  In such periods, I appreciate that I am making a specific kind of progress, but I often feel stuck or trapped at the same time.  

At present, though, I am writing a lot of different types of poems.  I am often finding them arising from new ideas of how I might start a poem, or even concepts around the way to organize and structure language in order to create a different kind of poem.  Some of this is directly inspired by other work I have read or been exposed to, though often in an intuitive and unplanned way.  In the end, I am feeling a certain playfulness in the work, a sense that I can try anything, even if it seems silly or a bad idea.  Some such risks pay off, and even those that don't may yield important lessons.