Been reading, editing, gardening, sewing, cleaning.
I have a backlog of books read that I’d like to summarize, note, review.
Eventually they’ll be too many and I’ll skip and start where I’m at again.
I’ve been thinking that a chapbook can be as dextrous as a bicycle, moving nimbly among items of a meditation. Single poems in magazines often feel fragmentary, as if a bicycle part, if you will. What does that make a 97 page poetry collection? A panel truck full of bicycles and parts.
Maybe the analogy misleads, or overgeneralizes. But it seems there’s often a driving necessity in a chapbook that gets diluted when book form packages up many. Maybe an individual book overextends its natural length. Some small poems can be their right length in a short minimalist poem.