I holed up today with my laptop working on a project I started a day or so ago.
Every month since I started doing National Poetry Writing Month, I’ve made a new file with the month name, each file going into a folder with the year, and each holding all the poetry shiny and dregs for that month. Plus whatever other projects fell into that year.
I got this idea that it would be good to go through and round up all the haiku into one file and then collect all the non-haiku poems that I thought worthy of a second look or edit into another.
Pretty silly little project if all you’re doing is cutting and pasting but of course you can’t help but read and wonder along the way. By the end of today I sort of regretted deciding to be editorial about the non-haiku so I might have been more generous towards the end but still everything didn’t make it. There was just more I liked.
Anyway now I have two files that contain stuff from 2012 to 2016. That’s a good stopping point I think – wait til summer or so to look at the current stuff.
Just now I found another couple files that were pre-having-a-system-for-all-this. That added quite a number of haiku, plus the mage haiku. Without the Gnomic Saga which is 300+ haiku by itself, that’s a big pile of haiku. Keeping the dates separate and with some explanatory notes and links, there are a lot of blank lines and spacers but even so, the total number of lines in my text tile is 8726.
Now I’m ready to write a few new poems for today and to put on my editing hat. And let’s just say there are some themes.
Here’s a haiku written today as a comment to Paul Nelson’s FB post re World Poetry Day:
Where go all the words
When the spring comes rushing in,
Sparkles in her eyes.
I’ll just go ahead and edit this one now:
Where go all the words
When the spring comes rushing in,
Sparkling, her eyes.
