I’ve done some difficult work with my writing this past week. Generally, I write my poetry in series or collections. There is a natural grouping in my work as I write it, but then, as time wears on with revisions and rewrites, etc., the shape of the original collections naturally changes. Over time, I’ve put together 5-6 different groups of poems, ranging from 25 +/- to over 50 in a collection. Over the past 2 weeks, I dismantled all but one of the collections, planning to regroup the better poems as collections that might work for publications. (The one that I didn’t dismantle is almost ready for publication as it is grouped.) It was a tough decision to make, but I think it has been good. By only including the stronger poems, the work is much better. And, one longish collection (nearly 40 poems) has emerged, and one short collection (under 10). Both are much more even in terms of quality, and the themes are much more tightly developed as a result. I have actually even found a market that suits the shorter collection (in fact, the market determined the length of the collection).
Perhaps feeling a bit emboldened by the success of dismantling the collections, I finally managed to rewrite two poems I’d written very early on in my experiments with poetry. I knew the ideas in the poems were good, but somehow they didn’t work in the forms in which I had them. When I reworked them this week, it was a bit scary, something I wasn’t sure I wanted or was able to do. But now that it is done, I am very, very pleased.
Sometimes, growing pains can be a good thing.
