Organizing

I’ve spent most of tonight going over all my old poems. And I mean, all of them. Everything I’ve ever written has been systematically dumped inside a “Poems” folder. Stuff that’s from my undergraduate days, saved as .wri Microsoft Write files.

I went through and pulled out anything that I thought was worth working on, as well as the files where all I had were ideas or notes or quotations. This first pass, all I did was filter out the crap. My next job is to go through, and figure out which poems I can potentially send out. And from there, I then need to find a good way to keep track of which poems have gone to which journal/magazine.

Database popped into my mind, but maybe that’s overkill. Once things get pushed into the mail, and the whole submission process gets underway… tracking this stuff seems like a daunting task. I’m curious how other poets handle this sort of thing. Notecards, I suppose.

Honestly, I’m amazed how long it took me to sift through everything. All I really did was a superficial pass, and that took a good two hours. It’s weird in a way, opening up all those files and looking/reading over the writing I did. Some poems were just shy of ten years old.

It was a bit like flipping through a diary. Beyond the poems, I got a glimpse of the person behind the words. A bit like snapshots. I was embarassed several times, I was taken by surprise several times. I don’t know how to describe it.

Imagine I had my life documented, separated into individual segments. Now imagine you could flip through and examine what I was thinking, who I was on any particular day. How crazy would it be if something like that were actually…

*looks at blog*

waitaminute.