Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.

After considering in some detail the several collections of poetry in the Thomas Merton canon (excepting the two last works published in his lifetime, Cables to the Ace, and The Geography of Lograire), it would seem pertinent at this point to cross chronological barriers in order to focus on poems dealing with specific subject matters that occur with...