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

I wrote a bunch of poems tonight, and I felt pretty decent about some of them, and felt that a few were just me spinning my wheels, but there are one or two that I am just not certain what to say.  They surprised me in ways that probably indicate a positive shift, a movement towards something new or interesting, in some way, I suppose, but I still am not sure what I think about them.  They didn't seem to be very coherent, in some ways, to me, or maybe it is that they seemed to be uncentered in some way, to be moving through ideas but not really landing on anything as a cohesive theme.  It may well be that is only my impression of it from the writing and when I go back I will see some thread that underlies it all, a set of associations or something that I wasn't noticing when I wrote it.  These things can be driven from an unconscious place, or maybe it is just an accident that sometimes happens.  I don't know how poems come to be what they are most of the time, but I know that I have a process for doing it that I think works a fair bit.  Tonight, though, I am just wondering about these pieces, about whether it is just that I am tired and might have been a bit distant while I was writing these poems, might have been less focused, less consciously driven in some sense.  I don't know what it was.  That is part of the question.  I am going to wait to read the pieces back over until tomorrow so I can have a fresher perspective, and then maybe I will get a different sense of the work.

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