Photo by Flickr user Soya_pearl (Creative Commons license).
TW: brief mentions of physical and sexual violence
Last night I was cleaning and reorganizing my home writing space and found two manila folders stuffed with poem drafts, some nearly 10 years old.
I’m a very organized person, so this discovery was surprising largely because I thought the folders were lost when I moved almost three years ago. I mourned them and forgot them. It’s atypical for me to have printed poems anyway. I draft on screen and only print my work when I’m ready to edit or order a manuscript, because I like marking up my own poems like school; but then I usually recycle them. I’ve never been into saving drafts because I’ve always tried to trust that I’m making a poem better with each round of editing, and won’t want to revert to an earlier version. As soon as I opened the folders last night, I remembered how I had decided yeeeeeaaaaaars ago to keep this particular batch—rife with plenty of horrible writing, but solid ideas and the occasional bit of gunpowder—in case of a technology disaster and so I always had something on hand to try to polish.
Finding these folders was transformative and my skin is buzzing. I’m sipping coffee now, touching the folders in between writing this post, still processing what lies within, because I sat on the floor until midnight and read them all in one sitting when I should have been finishing the reorg and doing yoga and then, you know, maybe sleeping a little. I’m both tired and shot-from-a-cannon awake. I learned some things from my former self. Continue reading
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