the third book woes?

My good friend (and excellent, exciting, enticing poet) Keith Montesano (whose beautiful first collection, Ghost Lights is forthcoming later this year from Dream Horse Press...yeah, buddy, we're press-mates!) and I were chatting on the phone one night earlier this week when the conversation turned to the writing of new material once a manuscript has either a) found a home or b) been completed and put in the mail to find a home. The conversation centered less around publication--this point I'm not really concerned about publishing a manuscript since I don't even have one to send around and won't for a long while--and more around how and when to start a new project, a new manuscript, a new thing.

Because it's the only way I know how to talk about this topic, I'd like to look at it from my point-of-view...I'd love to be able to speak about folks with numerous books or at least a couple books, but since I'm not privy to the inner-workings of those poets' mindframes and creative impulses (though some interviews on the topic might be interesting...hmmm, that might fit into the scope of an anthology idea I've had for a little while now), all I've got is my own thoughts.

When I reworked, reordered, and rewrote parts of American Amen last fall, I knew that the manuscript was done, and that I wouldn't touch it again until it found a home...if it found a home. There was nothing I could do to it without deconstructing it, making it into something different. Basically, if I tweaked it too much, it'd turn into a different book, it'd no longer be American Amen. The poems I was writing this fall (and continue to write this winter) and even some that I wrote last spring and summer simply didn't fit tonally, contextually, metaphorically, or any other discernible way with the poems of American Amen. I was writing a second manuscript, though I didn't necessarily know it. I was aware that I was writing new poems that pushed beyond the concerns of A.A. both thematically and tonally, but I hadn't yet ruled out that the poems might fit in A.A. until this fall when I read through the book and couldn't find any holes fillable with the new poems. Did that mean the manuscript was done? Did it mean the manuscript was faulty because I couldn't replace the 2 or 3 poems I felt might be weakest? Were those poems really weak or were they just different than the stuff I was immediately concerned with and writing at the time? Or was I just being too overly concerned about the minutiae of the manuscript?

Well, it turns out that by the time I had finalized the first manuscript (which with first books, in my experience anyway, usually consists of weeding out all the poems written during the first 10+ years of writing poetry that fit together in some way or another and then organizing them organically as possible...in essence, the first book is sometimes a "greatest hits" collection of the poet's apprenticeship), I was already 30+ pages into a new project, a new manuscript concerned with different themes, different ideas, different voices.

The process of moving from the first book to the second book had happened organically because as I was finalizing the manuscript that would come to be American Amen, I was continuing to write poems just to write poems. The formation of the second manuscript happened by process of elimination as much as anything else: the new poems that didn't fit with A.A. went into a folder labeled "Other Poems" and over the months started to ruminate, copulate, congregate together into something new.

Because the poems that made up A.A. were written over a long period of time, I had accumulated enough poems outside the scope of that manuscript to have some ideas regarding a second manuscript, which now is becoming something quite solid. I know its ideas, its themes, its voice, its recurring images, etc, and I am now writing toward those concerns whereas with A.A. I was just writing poems for the first few years of its construction, not thinking about a manuscript, not thinking about anything other than the individual poem.

With the second book, I have a very clear structure, a very clear book-length idea of what I'm doing. So, like I said just earlier, I am writing toward something, am writing only poems that feed into that manuscript. It's not that I'm blocking out other poems that might not fit with the second manuscript, because I'm not, but because I'm focused, because I have so little time to write new poems, and because I know what I'm trying to do with the poems I'm writing, I'm not filling another "Other Poems" folder. In fact, that folder is completely empty right now, and that's what brings me to my question, my concern, my point (and damn did it take me a long fucking time to get here):

Has anyone else gone through this experience? An experience where the first book gathers over time and then the second book sort of accumulates over time, sort of comes off the back-ended, cut, different-voiced poems written during the last months of putting together the first book? My main worry (though I must admit I'm not actually worrying about it...yet) is that I'll keep writing the poems for manuscript #2, finish it down the road, and then be left with no "Other Poems" folder, no new project already in the works, no idea what the fuck to do next? How does the third book come about? How does one move on?

And again, I don't care about the publication of the second book or anything (though of course I will be sending it out when it's done); and maybe once I do send it out I'll automatically be thrown into a new subject matter, a new voice, a new project, but since I won't be sending the book out until I know it's done (like I did with American Amen this fall...I sent the damn thing out, in one form or another, for a long time before it was probably ready), I won't have the luxury of having a pile of poems to play with. Or maybe I will?

Okay, that's enough ruminating. This is WAY too long. Probably alienating you all right now! Thanks for indulging me!