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

The process of selecting and organizing work for the new manuscript is one that I find difficult to explain.  In some ways, I feel I have done nothing.  I've read poems again and again, considered them.  I have some notes and general thoughts, and I think a lot of other poems I believe would be good to add to the collection, but it can look as though it is just busy work and meaningless.  I don't have anything more to show of a book than I did before: a pile of poems in no particular order, with no easy explanation for why they fit together.   All this is the apparent truth of things, measured by the current state of the work as it exists on paper, and it is easy for me to feel that I am not getting things done, at times.  I spent a long time looking at a single poem and considering it, but did nothing to it, just read it a bunch and thought.  I didn't want to make any revisions yet, not until I have a grasp of the context for the piece in the book.

A few years ago, I attended a lecture by an origami artist who discussed how very complicated designs need to be folded all at once.  You cannot make them work if you fold one piece at a time, so you have to prepare each crease in advance and then fold them all simultaneously.  In many ways, that is how this process feels, with the process seeming to be just a bunch of preparation for something, but no real development yet.  At some point, soon, I am sure it will jump into focus, and then it will all fold into place, but for now, I need to relax and recognize that the work I am doing now may feel insignificant, the results may be imperceptible right now, but I can't find where any part of the book belongs, or even what it needs to be, until I know how everything fits together.

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