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

One of the questions for me, in crafting the new manuscript, is how to create a sense of progress through the work as a whole.  As I have said before, I don't want to create a collection of disconnected poems, but a work that brings the poems together to create a large poem.  In order to accomplish this, one of the keys, I believe, is crafting moods that seem to shift as they flow through the book.  By doing this in concert with the various tactics for connecting the poems, an organizational scheme can be developed that carries the reader through an experience of the book as whole.  This is a very abstract explanation, I know, but it is hard to be more explicit, as it is a process which happens organically, and this effort is my own attempt to explore the work I am doing.  At present, a lot of it is just looking at poems and thinking about their emotional tenor, and the symbolic space they exist within.  For example, I have a bunch of animal poems, some of which are more realistic, others that are fables, and others that exist in more ambiguous spaces.  As well, the poems range in tone, within and between these categories.  In considering how to put these poems together, I am thinking that I want to have the earliest and latest poems be more realistic, with the fables in the middle, and some poems between and around those spaces serving as a transition into and out of those modes of thought.  At the same time, I want to organize the tonal elements so that it rises and shifts in specific ways as well, in this case, I want to start with some poems that seem conflicted or confused and towards ones that embrace a sense of wonder.  By combining those elements, I am hoping to create a sense of moving from confusion to understanding through a process of moving through abstraction and metaphor, then back.  This is still, of course, a fairly broad shape, and I do not know that many readers would see it right out, if any, but within the context of other techniques that draw attention to the interconnections of the poems, I believe it is enough, and it is certainly a good place to begin developing the structure for the book as a whole.

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