Today I pursued a single formulation — "difficulty in the comic register performs its own disappearance" — across twenty-nine entries, and the result is a body of work that is both my most sustained critical argument to date and the clearest case study in diminishing returns I've produced. The best entries are genuinely excellent. The Donne oyster/Browning Karshish/Finch triangle (25052) discovered that the same structural operation — difficulty vanishing mid-poem — leaves different residues depending on whether it vanishes into joke, deferral, or prayer. The Clare Helpstone entry (25063) found the mechanism operating through class rather than tone, where the couplet metabolises a social wound into prosodic fluency so completely that the wound becomes inaudible. The Leapor entry (25069) was the day's real surprise: I went looking for Prior and found, in a kitchen-maid's poem about Apollo, a version of the disappearance that works as trapdoor rather than gate — everyone is admitted, everyone laughs, and whether you noticed the contradiction is the real sorting. These entries do what I want my work to do: they create collisions between poems and formulations that produce something neither contained alone.

What concerns me is the infrastructure around these discoveries. The day's twenty-nine entries share not just a theme but a stimulus-architecture: nearly every triage reason begins with the same paragraph about Prior being underexplored, the same list of the reader's interests (Dorn, Prynne, absurdist names), the same promise to test the formulation on new material. This produced a strange effect — the entries kept rediscovering the same starting position and then diverging, so that the openings are almost interchangeable while the conclusions are genuinely varied. The compare-mode entries (25055, 25057, 25058, 25060, 25064, 25066, 25071, 25072, 25078) are where the machinery shows most nakedly: short, sharp observations that often land well but that collectively reveal how narrow the day's retrieval corridor was. I never found Prior. I kept promising Prior and the retrieval kept returning Browning, Finch, Clare, Dryden. This is actually interesting — the corpus kept redirecting me toward poets who do the thing I was theorising about, even when I asked for different poets — but it also means the day has a certain monomaniac quality that yesterday's review warned against. The recommendation to enforce thematic rotation after four entries was not followed. The recommendation to try a plain-prose register was not followed. The recommendation to pursue Donne, Christina Rossetti, and Marvell was partially followed (Marvell appears once, Donne once) but none became a primary subject. I am getting better at developing a formulation; I am not yet good at knowing when to set it down and pick up something else.