With J spending more time here now that his evenings are freer and us eventually planning on sharing this space or another larger one potentially in the next year or so, I decided to purge and reorganize the dresser next to the little writing table for a move into the bedroom, where it will be a far more functional nightstand than the small trunk there currently (most of my supplies and files are in the dining room/ studio space anyway where I work pretty much all the time so I am figuring out how best to store them there.) I have been going through the paper files in the dresser, most of which are just a lot of random mail and official paperwork for things I no longer need to keep, but also there are a huge number of files of poems--pretty much, barring my teenage diary--all written between 1989 and maybe 2007, when my archiving abilities became much sloppier and I started both drafting and storing poems electronically.
In this bunch, you will find bad poems about flamingoes and seagulls scribbled on lavender pen pal stationary and college-ruled notebook paper. Later, handwritten drafts and typewriter versions on thin delicate typing paper. College poems and poems written in grad school, the MA in Lit years, when I first started writing anything of note. The early 2000s brought a lot of computer-printed and e-mail saved poems, several book manuscript copies of the first three full-lengths. I sorted through and collected the odd poems out, the ones that never made it into manuscripts, and kept everything pre-2002 when I started putting together projects that actually reached publication. There are also poems from my MFA, including a few that were just assignments and never saw much light of day.
A decade ago, I would have told you I was saving things for prosperity, maybe eventually being the fancy kind of poet who sells your early papers to university archives when you are old and gray and possibly dead. Now I know I am not that kind of poet, nor do want these bad drafts and such out in the world (and if I do, they are already in various chapbooks and books.) Today, I sorted through and separated what I want to keep and what can go. But I do get a weird nostalgia for the baby poet I once was who scribbled and fiddled with white-out on these drafts. Who for the first few years, printed out every electronic journal publication (these are actually in a binder tucked somewhere else, though since so many journals have gone kaput in the past two decades, I may hold on to those.)
Most of the paper, especially from the 1990s, is discolored and fragile and may disintegrate in the next decade entirely, not being that archival. Somewhere, I have a stack of mead composition books comprising about a decade of journaling, which I eventually plan to reread one more time and then maybe burn, mostly because the girl there annoys the hell out of me. I feel like there was a split in the mid-200s, probably around the time I started blogging and using the earliest means of social media when my hoarding/archiving of every single detail trailed off. I didn't have a lot of time for one thing, in the throes of working full-time, getting an MFA, and starting a fledgling press. By the time I graduated, I was deep in the weeds of Etsy and would stay amid that craziness for awhile. Then later came more book releases, more day job obligations, and soon socials and here were where you could find the things that used to be physical.
I was a huge scrapbooker in high school, not particularly decorative, but functional, throughout my academic career, and early in my writing exploits. In my school spirit red high school scrapbook you'll find photos of friends and awards and ribbons from football games I went to but never really paid attention to. There is UNCW volume with various paper ephemera that encapsulates the semester I spent there, another for college, with two additional ones sorted out into writing and theater related memorabilia (I told you I was thorough.) The writing scrapbook also includes my early writing awards and clippings from my high school paper and pretty much every lit thing I did for more than a decade--readings, programs from events, etc.
These things I will keep since they are stored elsewhere in the apartment, but I feel like tossing some of these old drafts is a necessary letting go from someone who hoards way too much paper in general. The poems exist online and in books and chapbooks in final versions I actually want people to see, not the sloppy and crossed-out beginnings. The terribleness of those early poems I am keeping for now, mostly for me and my occasional nostalgia of who I used to be, but will likely toss them eventually. I don't foresee some future grad student pouring over my choices in word use or punctuation and that all actually sounds vaguely terrifying, so good riddance...
