Owning All Your Writing–The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

In going through the backlog of poetry, most of which I wrote 20-30 years ago, I found, along with poems I liked and was proud of, a number of poems that now felt too embarrassing to even have my name on them (some of these were even published). And in putting together a binder of my work, I actually left some of these “bad poems” out, adding instead a number of what I’d previously categorized as unfinished poems that I was finally able to revise by putting into practice a lot of the craft I didn’t have twenty years ago.

It was interesting that just as I was winding down this process and settling back into my next YA fiction project, I reconnected with my old poetry friends, who ran a reading series in New York. This reading on the upper east side of Manhattan was my favorite among the many series I attended, and I remember fondly all the quirky and interesting people. Some of the poetry was amazing, some less so, but all of it, I realized, like both the poems of mine I loved and the poems of mine I am now embarrassed about having ever written, gave us the freedom to speak out about what was important to us, and to share that with a community–this was no small gift, and I treasure its difference from the modern day “poetry slams” where there are winners and losers.

So what I’m trying to learn from this is not to feel embarrassed about old material. It simply is part of the process of growing in writing and in life.