It's been a week of bits and pieces in terms of poetry. Let me record some of them here:
--In my end of the semester cleaning up of the paperwork piles, I discovered lots of rough drafts of poems. A few of them had some potential. A few I couldn't remember where I thought the draft might be going. A few I didn't remember writing at all.
It was good to remember that I did more than my computer files might indicate.
--I was making some poetry submissions to literary journals before the bulk of submitting season winds down. There are moments when I wonder why I bother. But the occasional acceptance still makes me happy, so I persist.
--As I was looking through my file of finished poems, I realized that I had reviewed a rough draft twice, once back in January when I first finished the rough draft and then again in April, when I had no memory of revising it back in January. I haven't circled back to see which draft I like better. It does bother me a bit that I had no memory of doing the original revision.
--On Monday, I was thinking about the trinity of nuclear war movies of the 80's, and I listened to this podcast about them and other nuclear war movies, including House of Dynamite. As I drove down to Spartanburg, a line floated through my head: The apocalypse will not be televised. Once my students started writing, I put poem ideas on paper and ended up with a fairly good draft, just two hours after the line flitted through my head.
It's not the way I usually create poems, so I was happy to have that experience, especially in a very busy week.
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