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.

A labor of publishing love, over a thousand pages in length, The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton is a disappointing volume. Bad lines abound from the book's beginning, whose opening poem, "The Philosophers," begins: "As I lay sleeping in the park, / Buried in the earth, / Waiting for the Easter rains / To drench me in their mirth / And crown...