One major feature of the Writer’s Notebook that came about because of the poetry-specific mental block that I had had prior to it was breaking down my poetry: looking closely at it and trying to determine what I thought was working and what was not, and trying to further elaborate on why.  This often involved writing a few lines of poetry followed by a paragraph or two of explanation and reflection on it — as is pictured below.

This proved to be extremely helpful because it made explicit my previously implicit and also less clear understanding of how my poetry was operating and helped to give my efforts a clearer direction to remedy the issues that I was concerned about and continue developing techniques that worked.

This is something I look forward to doing with students, since it is incredibly helpful.  Writing about another piece you are trying to work on is a great way to start meta-processing your own work and picking up on the best features of it and figuring out how to improve the parts that seem to stand apart as sticking points.