Poetry Progress in 2023

A few poetry inspirations and happinesses that I want to remember, as I think back across the past year.  It's been a year where I haven't written as much as I wish I had (but that's always the case), and it's been a year when I haven't read as many poems on the pages as I have online, and I don't know how I feel about that.  Let me make some reflections:

--I have moved almost all my poetry writing to the computer.  I used to write poems out longhand in purple legal pads.  Between my broken wrist recovery, which took longer than I anticipated, and lots of moving, it's easier to write rough drafts on the laptop.

--I would like to do more to create a poetry/sketch daybook.  Let me think about that as I move into 2024.  I need a new sketchbook, so I'll also get a daybook for what I have in mind.

--For example, I was moving the small table that holds the Christmas trees, and I saw one of them on top of Martin Luther's The Book of Concord, a collection of key historic Lutheran documents.  If I was creating a sketch/poetry daybook, today's entry would be a sketch of a Christmas tree along with these lines:

An ancient symbol, perched

 atop an ancient theology

Or would I do a haiku like structure?  For my daybook, I don't want to overthink it.

--With so many journals charging $3-$5 submission fees, I've submitted less this year, particularly if the journal has a fee.  I did submit to Tampa Review, just barely before the deadline.  As I looked at my submission log, I submitted on Dec. 27 last year too.  I have gotten personalized rejection notes from them, which makes me more likely to submit in the future.

--I haven't had nearly as many publications this year as many past years:  2 essays in Gather magazine, an essay in Demystifying the Manuscript:  Essays and Interviews on Creating a Book of Poems, and a poem in Dear Human on the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States.  My submission log tells me I made 26 submissions in 2023, so that's a 15% success rate, if I'm doing the math correctly, and if we're only defining success in terms of publications.  

--But it's still a tiny number of submissions compared to past years.  In 2019, I made 113 submissions.  But I don't think my success rate was any higher.  Happily, my professional and personal life is not dependent on publication.

--I also like that the larger poetry world is fairly friendly.  Earlier today, I saw this tweet by A. E. Stallings:  "Why is everyone anxious about taking down Christmas decorations? 12 days of Christmas, people! It ain't over yet." I wrote: Or we could do 40 days of Christmas, until Candlemas, in February." And she replied, "There you go. 12 days is really the minimum."  I am still thrilled when a poet who is much more skilled than I am (she won a MacArthur!  She's an Oxford Professor of Poetry!) responds.