A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-One-Hundred-And-Eighty-Four

I am thinking that I want to begin working on collecting some poems into a full length manuscript.  I think it is the best way for me to push myself into doing more revision work right now, plus, I have a strong sense of how I can assemble the work into something cohesive and meaningful.  The key, for me, is in interconnecting the poems in various ways, and to have the elements that connect the work build into something larger by the end.  In creating my last chapbook manuscript, I did this by creating twinned sets of poems and building a structure for the book out of how I arranged those pairs in a pattern.  In a similar way, I want to interlink the individual poems in the manuscript together to build a structure for the book.  The idea is to have a sense of movement and progress for the reader as they go from one poem to the next.  It doesn't need to be literal, but it needs to create an emotional journey of a sort.  I think that I know how I can do this, by sharing elements between poems, connecting them together across the book.  It is not something that I can really explain, I don't think, but I feel like I can see the process, and I am ready to begin doing this work.  It will require a great deal more than just selecting the poems and putting them together, of course, including a great deal of revision, and I will probably be writing a whole bunch of new poems as well, to help facilitate the overall project by crafting work that will fit and highlight some of the connected elements, but all of it has to begin by choosing the work I want to build the manuscript around.  I am already thinking about this question, but I believe it is best for it to wait until next week, when I am done with the poetry festival and have a bit more time for myself.

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