I started an odd little linguistically surrealist poem yesterday, which rhymes and is metrically jerky and is nothing at all like what I usually write. Probably it's awful, but nonetheless it's an interesting exercise in aphoristic confusion . . . though, now that I consider the matter, I remember that William Blake was also prone to aphoristic confusion, so perhaps this formula is more traditional than it feels.

My plan is to spend the entire day being a poet, which does not presage laundry or catsup canning but does require me to slavishly follow the windings of my illogical mind, to conceal the kitchen table beneath splayed-open books, to take notes about everything, and to be on guard against the simplifications of end-stop punctuation.

Here's what I think. When writing a first draft, you should never trust a period. It shuts a door to a secret passageway, hung with spiderwebs and black beetles and stacked with dusty steamer trunks crammed with unpaid bills and first editions of novels by faded ladies and shrunken whalebone corsets and false mustaches and cruel letters home from college. But if you don't open that door, you will never know they exist. If you don't erase that period and replace it with "and" or "which" or "while" or "because" or "despite," all you have on your page is what you already knew anyway. And what's the point of that?