Slowing down, not stopping

No question in it. An announcement, really, the kind people make to their readers so nobody wonders where they went.

But there is a quiet sorting going on inside those two sentences, and it is worth hearing slowly.

If you have ever served something you love until there was no time left to do it yourself, this is for you.

Writing about it, or writing it?

Seventy-eight pieces in three years. Thirty-two essays and forty-six reviews. Almost all of that is writing about poetry: reading other people’s poems closely, holding them up to the light, helping readers find them. It is generous work. A small reviews site is a kind of hospitality for an art form that rarely gets enough of it.

Then, at the very end of the list, after work and after family, comes the third thing: “my own poetry practice.”

Those can feel like one thing, because they live in the same room. Same books, same words, same love. Yet they draw on different wells. Reviewing asks what someone else’s poem is doing. Practice asks what is moving in you that has not been said yet. One can go on for years while the other waits, and the busy one can look, from the outside and even from the inside, like it is the same as the quiet one.

It is not. A person can be fully immersed in poetry and still not be writing their own.

Slowing down, or stopping?

“Sloooow down” is spelled with care. Those extra o’s are not a goodbye. They stretch the word the way the writer wants to stretch the time.

Burnout tends to tell people there are only two settings: full output, or giving up. The post refuses that. It names a third option, a slower pace, and the body of work does not shrink because of it. The seventy-eight pieces are already written. They stay written. What changes is the speed of what comes next, not the worth of what came before.

Divided is not the same as lost

“Time divided between work and family and my own poetry practice” sounds like a complaint, and part of it is. Getting burned out is real tiredness, and it deserves to be taken at its word.

But look at what the time is divided among. Not distractions. A job, the people at home, and a calling. Each of them is a good thing asking for the same hours. That is a different kind of strain from wasting time. It is the strain of having more that matters than there are hours to carry it.

From the book

Writing is an act of thinking, processing, and integrating. You cannot write without referring to and drawing upon the psychic record of your identity, values, and experiences. Writing is an act of distinguishing, sorting, prioritizing, and externalizing your thoughts. Writing is an act of parsing your internal world into understandable components and documenting them in a way that makes them comprehensible to you and other people.

In context: this opens the second chapter, “Does Writing Make You Intelligent?” under the heading “Writing Is Thinking, Feeling, And Maturing.” The middle sentence carries the weight here. All writing draws on “the psychic record of your identity, values, and experiences,” reviews included, which is part of why seventy-eight pieces can wear a person out. But a poem draws on that record without someone else’s work standing in between. That may be why a writer can feel full of words and still miss their own.

Going deeper

Levi put it in two short sentences on Nostr on January 12, 2025:

Time is more important than money. Meaning is more important than time.

Read next to this post, the second sentence is the one that matters. Time divided three ways is a real limit. But the question underneath the slowdown is not only how many hours are left. It is which of those hours carry the most meaning, and the post already seems to know part of its own answer: it named the poetry practice last, and called it my own.

The essays and reviews are a gift that already happened. The poems are still waiting, and there is no hurry in the waiting.