Earlier this summer I was actually thinking (well, hoping) that Regina Walks would be the final piece of the poetic and the pandemic project, but I made a commitment to myself that I would carry on with the project for however long we were living with this pandemic. So when we found ourselves into a fourth wave this summer, the questions for me became: How to continue on with this project, when I felt that I needed to give myself, especially my eyes, a break from the intensive process of video editing? How to continue the project while also opening up space for the exploratory work I want to and need to be doing for a new project that is already underway? And how to keep working on both while not forgetting about self care?
What feels manageable and feels right for me, right now, is to work on the poetic and the pandemic by continuing to go text walking and working with my gathered material to write short, text walking postcard poems.
I will post the new poems here on this page as they are completed. And I’ll use them to write and mail out some postcard letters as well.
* * *
They say we’re already into a seventh wave of this COVID-19 pandemic. A lot has happened between the fourth wave and this current one, globally as well as in specific countries, provinces, and communities where we find ourselves living or traveling. And these waves, have also created a ripple effect of ever shifting conditions and challenges, it seems. During the span of time between the fourth and this seventh wave, my interest or ability to keep up with the text walking postcard poems waned. Actually, I realized recently that it had been a long time since I even last went out text walking. I even found myself wondering if my text walking days were over … but then last week I found myself on an unintentional text walk. And that led to the short text walking poem, recycling eye.
(Tuesday, July 12th, 2022)