A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-Six-Hundred-And-Seven

I am starting the process of conceptualizing a full length poetry collection.  I've got more than enough work, I know that, but I tend to think of a collection as something cohesive, and preferably with a structure to provide something along the lines of narrative.  It may not be a story or anything of that sort, might only be thematic connections or a progression of ideas, but the goal is still to weave the poems together into a larger composite work designed to create a complete experience for the reader.  I want there to be a sense of propulsion and an understanding that the poems are connected and working together within the whole of the collection.  I feel that I have found ways to do this in shorter manuscripts that I've crafted before, but trying to put this to work on a larger piece feels more difficult at the moment.  I just have to trust myself, though.  In the past, I often didn't have a really clear idea of what was going to emerge when I began, I just had a pile of poems.  It was in looking at the poems that were going to be in the collection and realizing how they fit together, seeing the patterns of connection between the pieces, that a larger work was able to organically develop.  While that doesn't really provide a strong sense of just how this will go overall, I do, at least, know that the first step is one I can manage.  I have plenty of poems, I just have to pick the ones I want to put in this collection.

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