A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-One-Hundred-And-Ninety-Two

I had wanted to get a selection of poems cued up for revision before Melissa and I leave tomorrow, but I was too distracted today to get to it.  I can still look from my phone while I am away, so it isn't that big of a deal, but I would have liked to be a bit ahead.  My goal, as mentioned in a previous post, is to pick work for a full length collection, and to revise it with that in mind.  I tend to think that the work in a collection should have a cohesive quality, and that their should be some sort of a connective thread to help propel the reader through the journey of the book, something to serve the function of narrative, though it is not so tidy or literal as that.  It is more stream of consciousness, where the poems have elements that carry through, threads that seem to weave in and out of the text, in a way that provides a pattern for understanding and crafts a sense of the deeper context for the reader.  For this to happen,
the work has to include those elements, of course, and that is why I think that revising them together is important.  In many ways, a poets work is always cohesive: the obsessions of a poet tend not to change.  Themes are constant, as are modes of thought, even types of poems.  I have a penchant for certain kinds of fables, for instance.  If one reads a poets work, one finds that their are many things from small images to characters to political perspectives that return over and over.  That is to say, it is not hard to see the kinds of similarities in any set of my poems, because they are all qualities in my poetry already.  At the same time, the revision process provides an opportunity to develop these in specific ways between poems, and to organize those journeys throughout the book.  It may be as simple as reflecting a single detail in a second poem so that the reader will recognize the relationship between the pieces.  By organizing the work carefully and accentuating the right elements, the reader can be guided to see the poems as not only individual pieces, but also as a cohesive collective work.

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