Today, I was arranging copies of the newest book offspring on the shelf amongst its siblings and thought about how those handful of books (seven here, though I've written several more) represent about 20 years of writing collectively. Its hard to believe I managed to find publishers for them, but maybe even harder to believe I've actually written that much (and these do not even include the elevated productivity of the past three years.) Twenty years ago, I spent the summer, on break from my elementary school gig filling notebooks full of fiction, having given up on poems almost entirely. Within a year, I would be writing them like crazy and finishing my first chapbook. Time is a weird thing, especially now when we are living in a strange stasis. I don't believe I've written 20 years of poems, and yet there they are. The earliest in this stack were written in 2001, the latest in early 2017. In between, there is so much happening...
Looking at my first couple of books, I am definitely better, leaner, less floppily "poetic: than I once was, and the poems are the better for it. I still like the books, but there were a couple years in the middle where I wished they were tighter, that I could rewrite them somehow. Then, a couple years later, somehow circled back around to thinking they were better as they were. Even still, they are an excellent time capsule of where my head was at the time, where my life was and what I felt it important to write about. They can't really be anything else since the writer who wrote them barely exists anymore, These poems are a testament/memorial to her.
So I go forward, with more poems and more books, even during this weird time, plotting where to send or what to do with the books in hand that are ready, or just about ready, to think about sending out or publishing. Here's to 20 more years...
