Word Babies

I'm wondering if, for now, I need to get away from the idea of completing a collection of poetry. Of the three dozen or so poems I wrote in the past two months, I managed to salvage nine. Which is far less than I'd wanted to pull from that group. In addition, none of them (or only maybe two or three at a time) are cohesively bonding in an I Want To Be In A Book Next To You way. So my goals, for the most part, sit stagnant and incomplete.

In getting away from the mindset of a larger collection and focusing on groups of three at a time, however, I realize the latter is a method that leads to vitality in one's writing, whether writing a book or not. It's an obvious point - editing requires meticulous attention and focus on the small parts that improve the quality of the whole - but one that I tend to forget when I've got the bigger picture of a project in mind. My attentions are so scattered, for that of a writer, really. I can never grasp how poets write a whole book around the same theme, as I sometimes can't stick to one subject for more than one poem, even. This, all added to the fact that by the time I got around to this three-dozen-poem batch, hardly any of it showed any promise of getting to a polished state...likely because I've read a lot of poetry in the interim and learned much more about writing it and how I want to write it. It's exasperating. If there's such thing as learning too fast for one's own means of creation, I own said conundrum.

Yet another comparison is illustrated between writing and parenting; both are unpredictable and entirely in control of your achievement, and you're only as good and strong as your weakest one.