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

Now that Melissa and I are back at home, I want to really begin working on a full length poetry manuscript.  The first thing that I am going to need to do is to just select work for it, and that is not going to be the easiest task.  I have a lot of poetry and I am not certain about just what I want to focus this book around.  It will be good to begin with some poems that I have had online, I think, in particular those that have received the best response from my audience.  That will provide a bit of a direction, perhaps.  It may be enough to have even just a few poems to start building around.  I have a process for this, I know, but it is very intuitive and not at all clear, but I know what has worked for me in compiling poems into a chapbook, and I feel that this is going to be a similar kind of process, just on a different scale.  The real key is to just get a sense of the work and then to examine how it all connects together, though I also know that I will need to keep myself from going so deep into this that I get overwhelmed.  It has to remain more of an intuitive process than an intellectual one.

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