Monthly Archives: February 2026

Marie Kondo-izing My Poems

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Every two years in late February/early March I go through a process of reviewing my file of “active poems:” and revise my send-out A and B lists by consigning the poems that are no longer speaking to me as well as I want them to, to one of three places: “Poems to Work On,” “Meh,” or “Inactive.”

Anyone who has seen my house will know immediately that while I might admire Marie Kondo in theory, I don’t put any of her principles into practice. But for some reason, I find revisiting and re-categorizing my poems highly soothing. And I like her simple criteria for deciding on whether or not to “keep” a poem: Does it spark joy?

Diarmuid Greene / SPORTSFILE / Web Summit, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

So far, I’ve gone through all the poems in my send-out list re-evaluating them according to the following criteria:

  • If it still packed a meaningful punch (at least in my own mind) when I read each of my A-list poems over, the poem stayed where it was.
  • If I wavered, or if the poem felt still good, but just not as crucial to what I wanted to say to the world right now, it went to the B-list.
  • If there seemed to be something missing or unfinished, I stuck it into my folder of “poems to work on”
  • If the poem felt as finished as it was going to be, but held no energy for me, it went to the “Meh,” folder
  • And for the poems that no longer sparked any joy, either because they lacked craft, clarity, or relevant meaning for me. Or, if they felt dated in some way (too connected to a past event) off they went into the Inactive folder

Like Kondo, I tried not to overthink my choices. I simply read each poem and thought, Does it spark joy? 

After I went through the A-list poems, I went through the same process for the B-list poems, leaving some where they were and moving the rest to one of the folders. The best moments were finding a few B-list poems that sparked a lot of joy for me, which I moved to the A-list, either before or after some minor tweaking.

Part of my B-list consists of the poems that have “been around…” i.e. rejected more than 20 times. If I like these poems, I still send them out, just not as often. And while I didn’t move any of these back to the A-list, I found a few that I thought could be improved with some work and others that no longer held interest for me, whittling down my list a little further.

Then I read through the poems in the “Meh” folder, many of which I demoted to “Inactive.” But there were a couple of surprises that found themselves on the A or B lists, and a few others I put into “poems to work on.” And, of course, several stayed where they were.

Next up will be the poems in my Inactive folder. There’s nowhere lower on my classification that these poems can go–I don’t throw anything in the digital trash unless it’s so embarrassing or so personal I wouldn’t want anyone to find it after I’m dead. But I do try to sift through this pile every couple of years to find a few sparkles of joy in the dust. Unlikely any of these will go straight to the A-list, but I’m hoping a few will find their way into poems to work on.

And finally–where the real work will begin–the now swollen folder of poems to work on promises to keep me busy for several weeks, if not months. I won’t necessarily “finish” all the poems here to any level of satisfaction. In fact, some I’ll grow frustrated with and put back in the “Meh” or “Inactive” folders. And some poems have already been sitting in this folder for months or years. They will also need a Kondo assessment as to whether they still spark joy. But I am hoping that with some intensive revision, some of these poems will make it into either the A or B lists.

Of course, my favorite folder is the one marked “Published.” I don’t Kondo-ize this folder because once someone else has “claimed” the poem for their little corner of the universe, the best thing is to let it go–even if I can still find its imperfections. Yet, I do enjoy looking through this folder when I’m searching for poems to read at readings, or come across journals willing to accept reprints, or when I simply want to read some poems that spark joy for me.

But the big question remains: even though I do find “Kondo-izing” my poems so satisfying, will I ever get up the nerve to tackle my closet?

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Calm, balanced, and focused

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Daily intention-setting has become a regular practice for me. And I’ve finally managed to veer away from the laundry list of all I’d might like to get done to more helpful guiding questions like: How would I like to feel today? Or, With what qualities will I approach my day? Sometimes I lean into joy, or appreciation, or kindness. But what comes up more than anything else are three words: calm, balanced, and focused.

Calm has never been my modus operandi. And I may have even convinced myself at various points in my life that it was fine not to be calm, because too much calmness would flatten the angsty juice that drives my writing and other modes of creative expression. But especially in the last ten years, as my anxiety and blood pressure increased and I began to feel world issues on a more visceral level, the absence of calm began to feel like a tunnel in the shelter I built around myself that kept widening, leaving a clear path for termites.

Calm by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

Still, it’s hard to both lean into calm and also to feel the pain of all that’s askew in the universe. How many violent videos and horrible news stories can we take in before feeling flat and numb? It took me a while to realize that calm is not the same as numb, and that I could let myself feel and acknowledge painful realities without having to feel subsumed by them. In fact, being calm has made me a better activist, and I no longer fault myself for putting down the phone, and choosing not to read a particular post or article because I’ve had enough.

What this is about is being balanced. While I certainly take in my share of bad news and many times find myself ensconced in the sadness of either a personal or worldly situation, I’m at my best when I can stay out of overwhelm and balance my emotional responses with steady and thoughtful action. Balance also means tempering my day by adding nurturing and self-care to the things I put on my task list. And it also means balancing my expectations because I never get everything done on my task list!

And being balanced also means applying a steady focus on whatever I’m doing, rather than being distracted and trying to too many things at once–which, of course affects my ability to stay calm. And I’ll admit, right now, I’m feeling a bit frenetic because I only have 45 minutes to revise and post this blog before I’m called to other tasks that have times assigned to them for the rest of the evening. And I’ll also admit that I haven’t been very focused while writing this, as I keep veering off to answer emails or texts, or check social media. Intentions, at best, are aspirations that aren’t always met. So in addition to addressing my tendency to distract myself instead of focusing, I also need to be gentle–if firm–when corralling myself back to the task at hand, without beating myself up with a barrage of self-criticism.

Despite not always fulfilling my intentions, I find setting them useful. Because the ratio of calm/focus/balance to frenetic/distracted/overwhelmed has definitely increased–significantly–just by putting forth the desire. And the best is when I notice times that I’m deliberately cultivating calm and focus and choosing to ignore the urges toward reactiveness and self-distraction bubbling up inside me.

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Detaching Ourselves from Our Stories

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One of my favorite self-help books is Byron Katie’s Loving What Is. Katie’s method for getting to self-acceptance is quite simple on the surface; yet, delving into it can reveal all the complicated knots we tie around ourselves to make our lives sadder and more stressful than they need to be.

The process works like this: First, write about the situation that’s affecting your ability to be joyful in as much detail as you can muster, focusing on what angers, upsets or disappoints you. Likely, a “story” will emerge from your writing. This may be a familiar story you tell yourself, emphasizing common themes of self-judgment. (i.e. I’m always so disorganized, I never get things done on time…)

 

Then, Katie advises, ask yourself the following four questions:

 

  • Is it true?
  • Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
  • How do you react? What happens when you believe that thought?
  • Who would you be without that thought? Turn it around: Find three specific examples of how the turnaround is true in your life.

For years, the story I told about my piano playing was that I had huge family expectations placed on me because I had perfect pitch and also came from a family with many professional-level musicians. But I realized when I was 14 that I couldn’t play as well as I wanted to, so I quit piano. And that was the worst decision I made in my life, because if I hadn’t quit, somehow, I could have pushed through the technical obstacles and played at a higher level. So, to compensate for my failure, I pushed my children into music and piled all the leftover family expectations on them, which made me a terrible parent.

Is it true? Not really. But I had to wait 50 years, return very cautiously to piano, and write a memoir to figure that out.

Can you absolutely know that it’s true? Apparently not. My children said there was no need for me to ask their forgiveness. And neither they, nor anyone else in my immediate or extended family, experienced the generations of family pressure that I felt.

How do you react, what happens when you believe that thought? Even now, when I replay that familiar story in my mind, tears come to my eyes. I feel sad, angry, and like a complete and utter failure.

Who would you be without that thought? I would be free—able to make music on my own terms without self-judgment or generational baggage.

My Turnaround: I was a musical child with challenged fingers. This prevented me from going on a serious track with piano, but I had an inner understanding of music that shone through my expression. After quitting lessons, I never really gave up playing the piano because I loved it so much. And later, I explored other modes of music—guitar, chimes, klezmer music, singing in choruses. My brain, heart, and soul thrive on music as a staple in my life. Now, I’ve gone back to practicing piano more diligently and I’m amazed at how much progress I’ve made. What’s most gratifying is that I’ve stopped putting myself down for mistakes. Instead, I’m focusing on transmitting mood, color, and the ebullience I’m feeling as I vary tempos and dynamics. I’ve gotten to a place where I’m owning the piano again.

What stories do you tell yourself? How can you turn them around?

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When Do Stories End

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Every time I ask my 3-year old grandson, Manu, “Do you want to hear a story?” he stops what he’s doing and fixes his gaze on me, his eyes wide in anticipation, shooting me a little dose of performance pressure. But I don’t have to worry because if he doesn’t like the story, he intervenes to change it. He has a strong preference for the characters to be people he knows, so I can’t resort to folk or fairy tales unless he, or my cat, or the members of the Tokyo Paradise City Ska Band make an appearance and take over the action. Even then, he likes to interrupt and add salient or deliberately funny details on his own, so that the story quickly becomes a joint effort.

But sooner or later, we both run out of gas, as we did about a week ago, when I said, “That’s the end of the story.”

“Why?” I could tell from his tone that he was clearly upset.

“Because I don’t know what comes next. Do you?”

Manu followed up with a sentence or two, and then looked at me to continue. I added what I hoped was a closing sentence, and then asked him if he knew what happened next, He said he didn’t.

“Neither do I,” I told him. “So that’s the end.”

A couple of days later in one of my writing groups, a fellow writer lamented the elusiveness of plot. “I have so many words, but not plot” she said. And without a plot, how do we manage our words? How do we translate that hidden precious bud of whatever we’re trying to express while still making it conform to the parameters of fiction that people expect: plot, being an essential element.

Even though I’ve been told by many teachers that my first published book–a YA Holocaust novel, Escaping Into the Night–was so well-plotted that “even the boys who preferred more action-oriented books liked it,” I’ve never considered myself a master at plot. There are many fiction-writing books that can teach you how to map out your plot in advance, designating turning points one-third, two-thirds, and just before the end that raise the stakes–a common outline for Hollywood movies. This is probably a good exercise to do, though I’ve never done it. Whatever plots I’ve managed to nudge out of my writing have emerged out of deep attention to character and setting, and intensive pondering of what could possibly happen next.

Often I go through several periods of trial and error before settling on what feels both realistic and meaningful in terms of getting across whatever underlying theme I’m struggling with. It’s not that different from riffing with Manu on my cat’s adventures in the backyard, except that instead of abandoning plot points that don’t work, we just keep going on one wacky tangent after another.

Lately in my own writing, I’m coming across another issue in plotting and determining where stories end. Even though I’ve already written and published a book of short stories on immigrants, the issue keeps tugging at both my activist and creative heart. But in the new fiction projects I’ve started on the topic (a couple of short stories and a YA novel) I keep getting to the point where every answer I can imagine to “what happens next” is so horrible, I can’t even write it down.

Maybe, I just need to follow Manu’s example when it comes to the issue of ending stories, and just refuse to say, that’s the end. At least, not until I can see past these awful moments into a brighter and more hopeful future.

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