Are You Hoarding Poems Too? I Found a Whole Anthology!

Erupting from between the cracks in my book writing routine, poems come like feelings: hot blasts and inspired renderings, exploding during times of peak emotion. For me, this is why I swiftly file each poem away, to get on the with intensity of the inspiring event. Life dramas stack up. Poems stack up. And the years pass.

Suddenly, thirty-five years have passed, since I dropped tears on my first poem – scrawled onto school issued looseleaf paper, and neatly typed up for a typing assignment. My teen grief flowed out of me in effortless rhyme, the only poem I ever memorised.

Like that first broken-hearted composition, as I felt my feelings, poems continued to arise in my mind. I began to think in rhyme!

From time to time, I'd send one away to a poetry competition. In my early twenties, I even paid twenty-five dollars to have one published in an anthology. But so little did I value the place I had paid for, that I didn't even keep the anthology!

During my mid-twenties, I got my first computer; and tapped into it, two exercise books full of poems. I didn't name the files – just in case my secret words were identified. So I invented a numerical system that completely obscured the file contents from anyone who might look – including me. And so hidden from view, my poems lay un-caressed for decades.

So it came as quite a shock, when a couple of months ago, I started counting poems. I reached four-hundred before I got bored – and Googled how many I would need for an anthology. It turns out I have about four times as many as I need for an anthology. 

So I've opened a new file, called, Anthology One – for now. And I'm enjoying the methodical way it's all coming together: Copy and paste, copy and paste; it's quite hypnotic. Working with completed poems means that I've been able to create a first draft super fast. Let me share my process:

First – and this was the time-consuming part – I looked at each poem and tagged the best of them with, Anthology. This gave me a long-list of around two-hundred and fifty poems. 

Then I read each of those poems, passing over anything that provoked the slightest bit of boredom. Of the ones that interested me, I gave them a file name – so I can find them. Then I copied and pasted about one-hundred and twenty poems, and their titles, into a new document.

This means I'm now working with a new book draft, and I couldn't be happier. It's all happened so fast, like suddenly finding out you're nine months pregnant, and immediately having a new baby! I'm in the midst of the long, hard slog of memoir editing; so a smaller, faster project is rewarding in an instant-grat kind of way.

I never expected to consider publishing many of my poems, due to their personal nature. But after writing a memoir about sexual assault, not much is off the table.

For now I'm resting the anthology, and will focus on the memoir. I hope to start editing the anthology by summer. 

What inspired me the most, was the honour of being invited to be guest speaker at the Miller's Homestead, Words Aloud, Open Mic Night. I'd never performed a long set of poetry before, so it was a welcome challenge – and feedback was good. Good enough to fire me up! 

Another inspiring influence for me, has been listening to, and reading the work of other poets. I've read poems by a selection of poets, including: classic, modern and self-published. Consuming content fills you up, and pushes at your boundaries. It says, 'you can do this, so why don't you?' Fill yourself up with so much content, that it can only come back out – stamped with your own unique vision.

So now I'm revelling in the energy of two manuscripts on the go, and it's ok. There are times when each one will rest, and I'll have something to go on with. An additional writing project helps me to maintain a writing routine between book drafts. 

Do you write poems? What do you do with them? Are they accessible? Take a look and you might be surprised at how many you've hoarded over the years. Polishing one up for an open mic night is highly motivating. Once you've read one, you'll probably want to do it again. I did!

My approach to editing? Well, I like to approach each poem with the spirit of play, to make them less intimidating. I'll play pick a poem, read it aloud, and play with words until I think the poem feels a bit better in my mouth. At times, I've worked with formal structures; including: villanelle, pantoum and – my favourite – palindromes; but generally, my style is to let the poem fall onto the page in its own style. If I have an overarching style, it's probably musical. I come from piano, song and dance. This marks my style with song, dance and rhyme. But my themes are multifaceted, so this will be a general anthology that dances across topics the way life does – in ups and downs. 

This may be my last long post for some months, as I enter the final stages of memoir writing. I'm tired, but on track, and driven as ever! When you just know you're going to do something – you just do it.

If you have poems, I hope you find time to take a look. 

Just write, and keep going. 

TIP: Install a word processing app on your phone, so you can write poems on the go – and save them to your desktop straight away. From there, editing is too easy to avoid.

Leanne Margaret © 2023