Words Caged in Pretty Notebooks

A project I started the other day:  Carefully reviewing my current primary poetry notebook (there are two at the moment, one is portable, the other is larger). The larger one is the primary, at the moment, I think. I honestly, think the other one is stuffed in a backpack somewhere. I don’t know where the backpack is. I’m not organized.

Anyway, I recently (last week?) wrote a couple of poems in this notebook. And I decided to count just to see how many poems there are. The pages aren’t numbered, so there’s no quick “there are x pages so there are roughly y poems.”  A few pages have a couple of short pieces and some are a few pages long. Nature of the beast. I had to manually count them. There are 106. 106!

106! I guess it’s time to go through and toss a few of them out into the world. I hate submitting things for publication. I find it terrifying. Anyway, these are first drafts, they need some revision before I have to do the scary bit.

I’ve started by typing them into Scrivener.  I dislike that it wants to capitalize every line. I’ve given up on fixing it because these are little more than the original drafts typed. I’ve fixed some tense issues, and a word change or two, but nothing major.

I forget how much I write when I’m being prolific. LOL. I thought there were maybe 50 poems in that book. So before I counted, I said, maybe when I get up to 70 or so, I’ll polish up a few and see what happens. Oops 106, time for the hard parts.

There aren’t 106 good poems. There’s one that is terrible, except for one line which is magic. It wants to be the first line of a new poem that I don’t quite have the motivation to write. Maybe later this week.

I’ve temporarily given up on applying for day job crap. I should do more of that, but I’m easily discouraged. So, I am spending the week just focusing on writing/revision of my own work.  I may need to ask my BFF to slap me around and make me submit something somewhere before the week is out.

My favorite editor has put out an interesting call for submissions for a reading in a week or so. There’s an inkling of a poem swirling in my head on the topic, it’s not solid enough to put on paper.

OK, off to type.  I don’t share poetry here in this journal because many publishers would consider the work previously published if I did.