Looking at Old Journal Entries
I’ve just taken out an old writing journal spanning from the end of 2005 to the middle of 2006. I wanted to look back over some of the things I’ve been working on in the past 2 years and see what progress I might have made, and how I might have met or failed to meet certain goals.
The first entry in the journal is from 21 December 2005. I talked in that entry about wanting the concepts in my poetry to grow out of language, instead of trying to force language to fit what I already had in mind. I hoped that this would generate more creativity in the themes of my poems, instead of rehashing the same ideas in different forms.
I have to say that this is an area that has really improved in my poems since that entry 2 and a half years ago. It began with a conscious effort, and has become something more or less natural to me now. It is very common in my reading that I come across a word that hits me differently than it ever had before, or perhaps a group of words that I had not formerly seen as connected, but now see some new connection between them. This often grows into some poem or another, and the results are usually much better than when I have an idea and somehow try to find (or force) words to fit it.
One of the things I started doing at that time was the dictionary game. The first poem that came out of that game, “Temenos,” is one of my favorites. It is a complex piece, rather intricate in how it fits together. But what is interesting about it is that it grew out of the connections between the three words chosen at random from a dictionary, rather than me first having an idea in mind that I wanted to explore.
It is fun revisiting this journal, and I will probably spend some time doing so over the next few months. I’ll post interesting ideas I find here, from time to time.
One thing I hope to find is a record of a poet’s growth. It will be rewarding if I see that.
