More 'product' to follow when I can get at the other computer.

For the time being ... what I'm experiencing is an odd mixture of excitement and bewilderment. I thought I knew what I was doing. Or, rather, how these poems would develop. Instead, they seem to be pulling in different directions. Is this sheer incompetence? Or how the materials can work if you allow them? I don't know. Furthermore, they get more demanding - the first ones were quick. The more recent ones are half-finished, won't gel, won't co-operate. And they seem to be aware of each other in odd ways.

As such, it seemed to be a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E inspired procedure: deliberate setting of rules, a method, 'anti-expressive' stance. Then, on working with what is on the page, a very different kind of text emerges. I'm finding how one direction of abstraction starts to touch on ritualistic patternings of language: spellings (pun intended).

I suppose - thinking in terms of the visual arts - it's similar to the work of painters such as Klee, Kandinsky and Ben Nicholson. Does Formalism always tend to magic?

Those texts I started back in March & April - the 'Elaboratory' ideas etc. - seem to relate.

I'm thinking, too, of that great statement by Fanny Howe about her approach to her writing in the Daniel Kane volume - "I think of them as days more than anything else, days in the ancient sense of an act or a feeling that begins and completes itself. How many times the sun sets in that kind of day is of no importance. All that matters is knowing when it ended, and, more mysteriously, when it began."

So maybe I should just accept that work from 9 months ago has decided to resurface in what I thought was something 'new'.

What do I know?