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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