Sometime early in my writing education, someone said you never throw out any of your writing.
I don’t think I have ever really taken it to heart but there is a part of me that desires to keep everything I have written. There is a part of me that hopes somewhere in that awful poem I wrote when I was 15 there is a gem that can be polished out.
But sometimes a pieces of dirt is just dirt.
I don’t have much of my writing from before I went off to college. I know I had notebooks, everything was handwritten, but I am a lover of cleaning things out of “purging” so to speak (although I’ve never tried bulimia, I hate the actual physical act of a body throwing up) and most of what I have from college forward is from spells of when I would type up the poems (I always handwrite first) and then print them out, but I know there are probably old disks in some landfill somewhere of work I never printed out.
Yet, I don’t miss these poems. I have so many pieces of writing that may or may not ever turn out to be “good” and this morning I retired one of those. It was in my “Fat Girl” chapbook series. It isn’t in the current copies I have in circulation but was one that I had hoped to revise and include in later contest entries. But the poem was just flat. I could feel it but I know some people would say I should tuck it away somewhere. But I’m not going to. It feels refreshing somehow to let it go. That it is one less piece of writing I need to worry about in the future.
Any thoughts on that out there? Anyone else actually purge your words to the point where they no longer “exist”?
Now if I could figure out what to do with the other hundreds of pieces I start….hmmmm
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I don’t “purge” poems on my computer. But I don’t keep every “draft” I write either. For one thing, I don’t know what a draft is.
Have I created a new draft with a single word change? No? Well, what about line change? What about when I rearrange the stanzas or put them back? Does it occur when I get up from my computer? For the day? Or, when each washer-load needs to go into the dryer?
My “old, abandoned poems” are still in my Poetry file. And sometimes I revisit them to see if I wrote anything that matters. If I did, that fragment usually ends up in another poem. Or maybe even in two. I’m that unorganized.
The person who organizes my “papers,” after I die, will be really busy.
You know, I don’t purge drafts on my computer. They are all still there (except for the ones that were like on my old word processor from college who knows where those disks are!) hmmm…mainly I just purge the printed copies.
Hmm…starting to think I don’t “purge” as much as I thought I did?
Speaking of papers. I am almost done reading “Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke Box” the collection of unpublished work by Elizabeth Bishop and it is interesting to see how her mind worked but not sure if I think this it is the best collection that could have been put together. But the lady who put it together really spent a lot of time on the scholarly work!