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

The poetry I write today is very different from the poetry that I wrote even just a few years ago.  This is, of course, inevitable, of course, especially when I am writing so much.  It is normal to learn and grow, and the work is bound to shift as that occurs.  It is necessary and natural.  At the same time, it is also quite understandable, I think, to lack confidence around that new work when it appears.  I recognize what was good in some of my older poetry, in terms of how it was structured and the ways it functioned, but the new work that I am doing is, as I said, very different, and I don't always have such a clear sense of it.   This is one reason why I think it is important for me to just maintain my routine and focus on writing as a process, as it keeps me from getting caught up in self-doubt.  Each day, I just focus on the act of writing itself, not on the output.  That is enough to help me keep my commitment to the work.

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