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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Yesterday, I found myself meandering through my short story file and opening up some titles of work I didn’t recognize to see what they were.

Sometimes when I do this with an archival file of past writing, I find some pieces with hidden sparkle that I’m inspired to work on. But yesterday, several files that I uncovered brought me nothing but embarrassment and a slight tinge of shame. The situations I’d tried to fictionalize were too close to autobiographical for comfort, revealing truths I might have needed to process at the time, but likely did not have enough relevance or context to be useful, insightful, or enjoyable to outside readers.

And since I’m a big “what-if” fantasizer, I couldn’t help but worry about what might happen if somehow, after I was dead, these thinly disguised files were seen by the people involved. I didn’t want to risk being hurtful, especially with no way to explain, apologize, or make amends.

So I did a radical thing. Command A, Command C, Delete. Move to trash.

https://freebie.photography/concept/slides/throw_away_concept.htm

Four key strokes. The words were gone, the files disappeared.

And then I worried. Had I been too rash in throwing away my work? Was there something salvageable in these pages I could use later? Was the impetus to toss generated by my (somewhat) objective writer-self, or my condemning inner critic, who probably thinks I should throw away everything?

Too late! They were gone.

And while I’m obviously having second thoughts, I do think it was the right decision, mostly because of the hurtful potential of these particular half-drafted stories. But also because they were all so old, I barely remembered them. And because I really was no longer drawn to write about these things. And if I am in the future, I think the stories will be better served starting afresh with whatever wisdom, perspective, and distance I’ve gained between then and now, enabling me to crystallize the issue and contextualize it in a way where the specific situation and actual cast of characters are no longer recognizable.

When you toss something right away, it’s usually because your inner critic is telling you it’s crap, and we all know how unreliable inner critics can be. So I wouldn’t recommend throwing away anything you’ve written in the last year–or maybe in the last five years, especially with the luxury of fairly unlimited electronic storage. But anything older than that–the choice is yours. Is there anything left in the piece that draws you? And if not, do you want this work to be part of whatever legacy you might want to leave?

So now I’m contemplating what else I should toss. A few months ago, a close friend from high school gave me a whole bunch of letters I’d written to her from the ages of 17 to 23. I read through them all and cringed, even if I could have had more compassion for that young, naive, and giddy girl, who comes off as so darn shallow. My first impulse was to build a fire and ritually burn them, as if putting them in the recycle box wouldn’t be good enough. But instead I buried them under a pile on my desk. A month later, I took more time when I re-read them, and was able to be a little more forgiving of my younger self’s flaws, but I’m still inclined to get rid of them soon–along with most of the contents in the boxes of journals in the attic, and the manila envelopes filled with letters friends wrote to me during my teenage years.

And at some point, I intend to go through more of my old writing and figure out what I want to keep, and what really doesn’t need to be anywhere in the universe, especially with my name on it.

Is it Swedish death cleaning, or more carefully constructing the legacy I want to leave? Perhaps a little of both. And yes, I admit to intentionally wanting to curate a picture of my better self, which may not be the whole truth. But how different is that, really, from waking up each day and trying to be that better self in real life?

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I’ve often joked that I can organize anything–as long as it isn’t tangible.

I’m skilled in creating focused agendas, facilitating unwieldy meetings, planning schedules, and tackling complicated logistics–all with the goal of keeping things on track.

And having spent the day on a variety of editing projects, I again feel thankful for my superpower–being easily able to make a sentence flow more smoothly into the next, and sensing how to move ideas around to create a more satisfying and compelling arc from beginning to end.

But if you dump a roomful of objects on the floor, even with a set of organizing containers from your local big box store, and tell me to put them away in a logical, accessible and attractive manner–I will scream. Or cry. Or both.

So, I understand the sense of overwhelm many writers have when trying to organize their ideas, even if the process comes to me somewhat intuitively–if not in the first draft, than usually in the beginning stages of revision. Yet, my empathy is not going help those who feel strangled by the vines in the jungle of their unruly mind, as I learned quite humbly, during all the years I worked in a university, attempting to “teach” students the basics of coherent and engaging writing. It’s still a struggle to break down the process of organizing ideas (or anything I do intuitively) into small replicable steps. And it’s even harder to think about how to do this for poets, fiction writers and CNF writers, whose projects depend on a certain degree of unbridled creativity. But here are some things I’ve learned from being in the trenches. I hope they’re helpful:

(1) When generating material, always trust your “wild mind,” and let the ideas flow where they will, even if you don’t immediately sense the connections. There will be plenty of time to rope in (or eliminate) tangents later. And the relationships between things you uncover will surprise you–in a good way.

(2) Don’t self-censor while you are drafting. Sometimes I’ll get to a place and think, I really don’t want to write about that. This could be because it’s irrelevant, too revealing, unpleasant, silly, emotional, etc. But even when I don’t use these blips of material, they often serve as a bridge to the real thing I want to write about. If I don’t let myself build that bridge, the seed of what really matters to me will never sprout.

(3) Once you have your generated material, be playful with it. Feel free to eliminate whatever you want (ideally without judging that material as “bad,” just not needed) and take time to rearrange what’s left several different ways, adding whatever you think needs more context, clarity, or overall “oomph.” This is the time to start thinking about flow and what’s holding the piece together–i.e. what you really want to write about, and the various ways you can get from the beginning of your writing path to the end.

(4) After you’ve done this a couple of times (or perhaps before Step #3, but definitely not before generating material), it may be time for an outline, especially if you have a longer project. For me, it helps to think of an outline as an aspiration and a way to help grasp “the big picture,” rather than as a directive from my inner dictator. This helps me deviate from and then revise my outline as much as necessary, or disregard it entirely once I know where I’m going and feel confident I can get there without it. (Yes, I am one of those people who often turns off the GPS!)

(5) Going through Step #3 several times–with or without an outline–will likely lead to even more cutting and rearranging, and you may be faced with eliminating a line, an image, or even a whole paragraph or several pages that you really love. It’s a writer’s curse–the idea that you have to “kill your darlings,” a phrase that has been attributed to Allen Ginsberg, William Faulkner, Stephen King, Oscar Wilde, Eudora Welty, G.K. Chesterton, and Chekhov, but was likely coined by the lesser known writer Arthur Quiller-Couch in 1914. But you don’t really need to “kill” those precious bits. Just give all the darlings a good home in a separate file on your computer to be potentially resurrected in another piece. Many of them may never see the light of rebirth, but they’ll still be in your files, and perhaps when you die, your archivist will discover all those unpublished little gems!

https://stockcake.com/i/mystical-forest-descent_3147025_1658520

But seriously, what I think is most important here is to have faith that you can get from Point A to Point B, even if you’re not confident in your sense of direction. It just may take you a little longer to find the path. And if you do get lost, make sure to enjoy the walk, rather than worry too much about where it’s taking you.

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slowking4, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons

I finally dived into Ellen Bass’s Living Room Craft Talk Series (half-price sale ends today) and so far, I’m finding it well worth the value. Though I usually find it hard to focus when listening to online lectures, Ellen has a way of making you feel as if you are truly in her living room. But make sure to have a notebook at your side to jot down the countless gems of tips and inspirational tidbits, and be prepared to press pause to play things over. However, even if you miss stuff, Ellen has graciously included handouts of all the quotes from her lecture in their entirety, as well as the sources of the books they’re in, so you can read more of what grabs you most.

While I might have arrogantly thought that after a lifetime of writing poetry I knew everything I needed to know about metaphor, I was surprised how much I learned from Ellen’s examples of the different ways writers use metaphor. And while I often express things in metaphors in all sorts of writing–including even emails–I’m often not super conscious of when and how I’m using metaphors in my poems, and whether I’m milking their impact to the fullest.

So yesterday I reviewed all the poems in the packet Ellen used to supplement her lecture and highlighted all the metaphors. While on my first read I’d recognized the ones that stood out in the wow zone… (e.g. grief as a homeless dog from Denise Levertov’s Talking to Grief & hands that “fly up like two birds while I speak” from Tim Siebel’s Ode to my Hands) I was amazed at how many metaphors there were, and how smoothly they flowed through the poem… to the point where I barely noticed the comparisons.

This led me to thinking more about metaphor as a conscious tool, rather than a momentary flash of subconscious inspiration (which is where I probably get 90% of my metaphors). Ellen talks about the importance of really working metaphors… choosing where to insert them by creating little slits in a poem in places where the message/meaning/image can be unpacked to create more emotional resonance or exploration of nuance. So I looked at one of my poems in progress, surprised to discover that in this particular poem there were no metaphors–just a generative rehash of a difficult emotional situation broken up into lines and made to look like a poem. I wasn’t sure this poem would have legs for anyone but me, but I spent some time consciously inserting metaphors and detail… and lo and behold, something with perhaps a little more staying power began to emerge. I’m still not sure whether the poem will have enough meaning for others, but I do believe the details and the comparisons have the capacity to generate more places for others to connect.

I know that people have different degrees of tolerance for metaphors. There are some folks who can find meaning in an amorphous avante garde play and others who prefer more directness and clarity. So, it’s important to think about what our audience(s) might need and how we want them to respond to our writing, and then craft our metaphors with care. Ellen points out the importance of grasping for the unusual metaphor, rather than the expected one, but not so unusual that people can’t make the leap. But I also know that not only have metaphors improved my  writing by giving more life and possibility to images and details, they’ve also helped me communicate hard stuff to others through a story or image that’s more relatable than a common abstraction.

And I love how metaphors often take on more than I might have originally intended through the lens of a reader/listener’s interpretation, unveiling possibilities that neither of us might have previously considered.

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