When I was a baby poet, I remember there was much discussion about waiting til there was a "right" time to start publishing and sharing work. A duration between your first efforts at putting words on the page and trying to find places for those words to appear in public. Even longer a duration before beginning to hot the "high tier" journals or applying for awards and funding. Before trying your hand at MFA applications and doing public readings. This time varied for writers, probably based on their own development as a creator, and certainly no timeline between two poets was remotely the same. But there was so much emphasis on waiting. On "when" to make your debit as a poet and how. Also where. The more academic the setting, the more strict and specific these guidelines and what qualified as "success."
I've always been a person who takes writing and art very seriously and yet sometimes, probably not serious at all. In college, when I was only writing in spurts when classes and late night rehearsals allowed, I started sending out work. First to mags and anthologies published in the back of Writer's Digest I checked out monthly from the public library. Later in vanity-esque anthologies that crammed several poems per page and required you to buy at least one copy. A couple college lit mag publications, and at least one campus writing contest that paid cash that last year. The work was pretty terrible, then less so as I neared graduation, but it felt important to be doing it. To be getting it out there. To be doing the thing. The poems from this period are often spare, usually emo, sometimes rhyming (yikes!) Then they weren't so bad. By the time I hit my MA program at DePaul, they were getting better, and of course, would get much more so. I was still intent on submitting--though now to places listed in Poets & Writers or venues like The New Yorker and Poetry. I was determined to finish a book by 25, and it was a terrible book, but some of those poems would later form my first chapbook and netted me what was probably my first publication in a lit journal as a regular submission. I still have copies of most poems I ever wrote, and this period feels like a snapshot of late 90's me. My obsession with the history and the Greeks and fairy tales (not much has changed really.) And most of those obsessions largely just because I didn't yet have much experience or writerly imagination to write about many other things besides what college and grad school had instilled in me. When I look at this older work, I used to feel uneasy should anyone read it, but now they are more like very old and badly shot photographs of your thumb or the inside of your pocket.
When I moved back to Chicago after working in Rockford for a little over a year in an elementary school (and therefore less time for writing or creating) I plunged back into writing and submitting to the newly opening world of online journals. The poems, some of which wound up in my first book, the fever almanac, are also an encapsulation of both experience and fictionalized narrative. Ditto with each book that came after. Each written over the span of a few years (though I write more and more often now after figuring out a routine and schedule that works better (mostly just writing first thing of the day rather than last) , so the time between new books is much less. My second book contained a couple of projects that originated in my MFA classes between 2003 and 2007. girl show was my thesis for that degree. Other books caught relationships and detritus of the other years. Some go really hard on certain topics and concerns while others, you have to look at them in the light to see the threads. In the past decade or so, there is much of loss and grief and desire that echoes non-poetry life.
In many cases, feeling ready is more about feeling a need to share projects rather than feeling like the work itself is "ready." There are obviously things I write that are not ready. Many things that get discarded and rebuilt into other things that are closer to ready. Some that get set aside or paused indefinitely because I don't know if they're ready or if they ever will be (blue swallow, ahem). Other things I finish and seamlessly drop into the world. There are a lot of projects that will be coming in the next year. Some are fast, some are slow. Some are good as/is, others need just a little more work. The time span on them is as long as several years, though also sometimes as short as a couple months.
The books feel like a vault, into which I have cast all my messiness and obsessions into, so its hard to take them seriously, but also hard to not take them that way. More like it feels I filed a room with treasures or madness or monsters and want someone, anyone, to see what it looks like right in that very particular moment in time.
