It’s 8am. I woke up early. I’ve already finished reading a chapbook of poetry. I’ve already written three or four poems. This is a nice change of pace.
Mentally, my wheels are spinning as I’m contemplating my tastes in and talent for poetry. What makes a poem good, or at least good to me? The poems in the chapbook were fine – by which I mean they were accessible and had some lines and phrases that I appreciated, but I’m not sure they stood out for me. Yet to call them uninspiring would, technically, be wrong. They were proximal in terms of what I think I could accomplish. Seeing them in print, quite literally, sent me to my notebook and computer to write a few poems. They reminded me that I might be able to do this – they inspired me to try.
Really good poetry (or at least good to me poetry) inspires me in a different way. It’s aspirational in terms of how I’d like to write, but it tends to take the wind out of my sails in terms of my self-assessment for where I am compared to where I’d like to be. The poets I most admire dedicated their lives to the craft. I’m a dabbler and it shows. Really good poetry reminds me that I’m not serious enough / dedicated enough.
When I look at the poetry folders on my computer, I get a different reminder about how un-serious and ill-equipped I am as a poet. The fifty-foot tall neon sign announcing my dabbler status is volume. I’ve been at this on and off for a few years and I’m not sure I have more than 300 poems to show for it. The billboard next to the neon sign announcing I’m a dabbler points out that I have no organizational system for my poetry. I have a draft folder and I have a poems folder. I don’t know what delineates a draft poem from a finished poem, an active poem from an abandoned poem. Paul Valery once wrote, “a poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Sometimes, I keep and save different versions of poems, sometimes, I write over them. Most of them, upon re-visitation, feel like drafts or worthy of abandonment – little street urchins that they are. I’m sure I have other poems lurking in notebooks and on this blog – subjects and thinking that could be mined or pared down… but digging through my own slush feels like too much work for very little payoff.
It’s almost 9am – I should probably turn my attention to more fruitful pursuits.