I am working on a book of poetry. I have written over 150 poems in my lifetime. I wrote my first poem 21 years ago, when I was just 13. Off and on through high school, and then more intentionally in college and afterwards, I would write a poem or two whenever the inspiration struck.
I am not a disciplined writer, and don’t have a daily habit of writing. For a few years after graduating college, I lived in the grey Midwest of Wisconsin. During one particular winter I took Stephen Fry’s book The Ode Less Traveled (Amazon) and went to Barnes and Noble. Utilizing their cafe space, and overstuffed chairs, I wrote poems regularly for a few weeks, following Fry’s breakdowns of classic poetical forms and easy to follow exercises.
Since then, my poetry has come here and there, as the ideas occurred to me. But, as I have said before, I’ve wanted to compile a book of my poetry to date, to have something tangible to hold and to share with the world. I have recently made a few more strides in that effort.
First, I complied all of my various poems. This was no easy task, as they were spread across many folders in my cloud storage, Facebook, here on my blog (search “poetry” as I’ve usually tagged my posts), and even some not digitized in a notebook I use for writing down thoughts. Finding all of them took quite a while.
Second, I started to edit some of the more, how shall I say, terrible? ones into a poem more palatable. Third, I have recently finished the first round of curation. I have marked all my poems, now organized into categories and folders, as Red Yellow or Green. Red are poems that I do not wish to publish, now or really ever, but don’t wish to delete. Yellow is maybe. I haven’t decided if they warrant revision or simply will become Reds. Last are Green, which I have decided will make the book.
Now comes the next stage of work: organization. How to order the poems in the book? I have around 75 Green poems, and they are on a wide variety of subjects. I have seasonal poems, pastoral poems, poetry about Star Wars and superheroes, about the apocalypse and spirituality. Perhaps what I should do is simply have each in its own enclave in the book, and order those alphabetically. I really don’t know. What I feel like I want to do is print them out, and then I can play with organization physically. As they are now, in the cloud, I can’t really sort through them or even see them all at once. It’s one file at a time, or looking at titles in folders. It is hardly conducive to really getting a grasp on what I have.
Beyond that is the literal book itself. I want to do something more creative with it than simply black words on white pages. I have a book of poetry by the artist Kevin Max, formerly of the Christian rock group dcTalk. He has left the CCM scene far behind, and has at various times released things other than music. One being a book of poetry called Po.Et.Ry. (Which reminds me, I need a title, too. Sigh. So many things to work out.) Anyway, Max’s book has artwork, mostly paintings, as backdrops to his poetry. Maybe I could do something similar? I’ve also seen collections that use photography to sit opposite poems, to illustrate or accent. Ideas abound; but few decisions emerge.
Clearly I have a bit of work in front of me. I rather think the easy part has come and gone and the real labor begins. November is rapidly approaching, and with it a tradition called NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month. I haven’t participated in ages, in fact I may have only attempted it once, but I want to participate this year. Only instead of writing a novel in one month, I want to get my poetry book to 85% completion. That would mean: poems in an order, design completed, and a title apprehended. I want to release this book for the beginning of 2022, and I would like to have December to contemplate the monster I will have created and leave time for tweaking. That way I could launch on time. Also, to date, I have only tinkered on this project in little bursts. November and NaNoWriMo would be a good impetus to work on it every day and make a concentrated effort to finish.
For now, I think I need to warm up my printer and start translating this digital book into real space.
a simple man 