setting up for a fresh book at speed is not my favourite or usual way of working, tho I have occasionally had to move quickly - it can work especially if a certain idea or ideas have been floating around in one's mind for some time, even without having taken notes or preliminary plans left to another day - in that sense some things can certainly look as if they had popped out of the blue, or wherever it is that things pop out of - so, a new type specimen book has been in my mind for a couple of years, and a book titled "&" likewise, but it is only recently that the two notions have come together, so that now the title of the next book is & another type specimen book - texts for type specimens are not always easy to come by - will I take quotes from various other great writings - will I prepare a nicely laid out alphabet - will I rummage among my earlier unpublished writings for whatever gems can be found there - will I write new texts, either little separate poems, or a longer poem spread over the several specimens - I decided to 'rummage' amongst my earlier writings and found I had picked out what looked very much like fragments from a longer love poem - I tried again, and found a series of small, somewhat gnomic sayings about the nature of the book itself - preferring the latter, I wondered if I should not actually use those fragments to write a new poem on 'the book' that would be spread across the specimen pages, but which could also be read as a single text - one of the little poems is -
we have this arrangement
with words
they will arrange us
in their order
it's still being worked on, and as the new paper is still to arrive, there is time yet to establish the specimen texts - with any luck, the weekend will see the poems completed, even tho, as the last one is likely to say -
nothing
gets
completed
