Meaning, meaning everywhere and not a drop to think
Meaning, meaning everywhere and all the thoughts did shrink

1. Whether or not I write, or what emerges when I finally choose to write, is in the hands of forces something along the lines of one of those spinning devices that are used for young children's board games.

2. My bit of comfort and security, so hard won, threatens the future of my writing because I am so much less watchful than when I was more worried.

3. So that even healing slightly wounds as it heals. But these kinds of discomforts are ridiculous when I complain about them.

4. Strategy- that unreliable friend.

5 Make a virtue of the trap. Describe it, follow it around, trace its movements again and again.

6. The form is a decoy from the unrelenting embarassment (stage fright).

7 Don't lie- you've already been sufficiently introduced.

8. Face your audience with a mirror- then hide behind it. Backstage, fix your mask using the expressions on the faces of the audience.

9. Listening, I am gently rocked by the repetition of silences, mimicked by the monotone of good advice and wise counsel.

10, This way- questions. That way- more questions.

11, Get out of the bubble to breathe.Now it's TOO quiet.

12, Fullness doesn't satiate because it is impatient for what is next. Incompletion satisfies because it leaves room for mystery.

13. I am dissatisfied with my readings of so many of the works of my friends because when I love them, they stimulate a need to answer them within my own work which in turn tends to crowd out the impulse to delve deeper into their work.

14.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

15. What was the image of the poem? All the poems I've loved. I can still feel the spaces they breathe in.

16. What is the opposite of quiet? It is cacaphony. Thought is cacophony.

17. I don't want to write "about" because this belongs to whatever it belongs to before I say it.

18. Keeping track of things is not interesting in and of itself. The feeling of organization soothes.

19. Interpenetration fostered by a degree of scatter. I only need one but I have two. Remember the critic's remark about the "impenetrability of patches."

20. What is a trope? For some reason, I have never wanted to know.
(9/4/92)