I keep stalling and starting on the spell poems. There are days when I open the page and something appears miraculously from my fingers tapping across the keyboard and others when I immediately close the file and do something less interesting, but more productive--post to Twitter, read e-mails, check submittable. Since it is August and I am prone to distraction an waiting to buckle down more seriously in the fall, I am less worried about my languor than I would be other times of year. That it could turn into months of writing nothing, which still could happen, though not recently. After all, I will be getting my glorious long mornings back with the library being open later during the term, which gives me nothing but time to write in the mornings if I want it since i do most of my press work these days in evenings and midnights. In summer, if I longer too long in bed, I am mad dashing into shower and out the door, but during regular semesters, I have several hours to dally over poems if desired. To approach the day as if I my time were, at least for a little while, my own.
I may also be stalling since the spell poems I feel are the last segment of the collapsologies manuscript I started during lockdown. Finally. It actually hasn't bee that long in book writing time, but still it feels like forever. Life in general feels like it has been forever, but also like I snapped my fingers and nearly two years passed. While I was not really present and while I was accutely, anxiously very present. Granted, I was also finishing automagic at the same time and moving back and forth between them--the former rooted very much in the actual world and the latter, not at all really. Very different books, but helpful when one or the other felt cumbersome As I wrap them up, however, I am still waffling over what is next. I have some non-poetry essayistic things I dream of working on. A couple other half-finished things. Some just conceived and not yet down on paper. I should just put them all in a hat the first of September and draw one to get to work on. It seems as good a system as any.
Going back to older things sometimes is a bit rusty, since sometimes the thing you were writing, upon revisitation, is not how you remembered it being. Are not the poems you thought you were writing. That somehow what you want from it, what it gives, are two every distinct things. I was thinking about it like a lid on a jar that somehow has sealed itself tight again. You just need to knock it on the counter a few times to get it to open again.
