Purple Legal Pads of Poetry Past

In the midst of a flurry of accreditation documents, yesterday my Outlook calendar reminded me that I want to submit to the Concrete Wolf contest for poets over 50.  It's a press that I like, and I can pay a bit more and get a copy of the winning book.

I will need to trim my current manuscript which is 72 pages.  The upper limit for this contest is 60 pages.  It will be a good exercise.

This morning I found myself thinking about putting together a new manuscript, one with a more clear religious theme.  I had an idea about mixing my Jesus in the world poems with some of my monastic themed poems and liturgical year poems to make a larger book.   I've been putting the poems that would work together in a file.

Now may be the time to actually create the manuscript.  By now I mean at some point between now and July.

I do not mean now, as in the month of March, which is over half gone.  I do not mean now, as in the last 6 weeks of this semester of my online classes, which will end in early May.

I am always grabbing time for my creative work in the margins of my other work.  I cannot imagine having vast swaths of uninterrupted time.  I can only barely imagine what it would be like to work for an institution which valued that work above the other types of work I could be hired to do.

In the past, I've written poems on my purple legal pads and left them to sit for awhile so that I could get perspective.  I thought it was important to have space between the original writing and the revision and typing into the computer.  I still think it's important.  But now I let too much time go by.  I should start making more of an effort to make sure the poems with publishing potential aren't lost to my drawer of purple legal pads of poetry past.

Could I look at one legal pad per week to make sure I haven't overlooked/forgotten poems that should be part of the new collection?  Yes, that will be my new writing resolution.