I worked on filling my handmade book yesterday. I decided on a poem called "Winter Fragments," which I thought would cross from recto to recto well, and I made some cutouts that I'm going to paste to the verso pages that face each section of the poem. I am not perfectly satisfied with how I used the page space, but I wanted this to be freehand so was prepare to put up with whatever I ended up being able to make. I'll take some photos for you after I paste in the cutouts.

Now I need to make another book, because my next idea is to collect a small batch of prose poems and present them as tiny stories. I thought of doing that in this book, but I didn't have enough poems to fill the pages. A smaller, squarer book will work better, and I'll have to find materials so that I can put it together.

I like this bookmaking project. It is creative in a new way for me, a sort of private publishing--no public goals, but a new way to think about the power of the visual (letter forms, page space) as it relates to the words in my head. Plus I love paper and pens and the physical sensation of a made object in my hands.

Emily Dickinson collected her work in fascicles--small, self-bound collections, even simpler than the very simple book I have learned to make. I've never liked that word, though . . . fascicles: it sounds cold and academic. Why not say she made her poems into books?