I usually work on just one poem at a time, but if an idea for another comes to me while the poem is still in progress, I jot down some notes on it so that I don't lose the idea entirely. I used to find that my most urgent ideas for poems would come to me right when I had a huge stack of papers or exams to grade. Now I am getting better at deferring the poem until later, but it does mean I write less when I am teaching. I procrastinate less and write less. When I save poems for later, they often don't catch fire in quite the same way they do when the heat of inspiration is fresh. But some poems are always going to peter out midway or turn out to be duds, no matter when I write them.
Susan
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