Poetry Project

I'm on "vacation" now with all these chagim (Jewish holidays). I put the "vacation" in quotations because a chag is not quite the same as a vacation, but the days in between are.

I'm using this as an opportunity to work on a project I've had in mind for awhile. I have SO many writing projects floating around, incomplete and in the works and abandoned, and SO many old pieces that I haven't wanted to lost into the filing cabinet that I'm trying to sort of collect and compile it all for myself. The first phase of this is to make myself an anthology of all the poetry I still like, and the second phase MAY be to try and get some of it into a published book where others can see it. (I really want to do this but have to do some research about getting poetry published.) Later I'll move on to my fiction and nonfiction. These pieces are fewer but significantly longer.

So over the past few weeks, during my writing time (about half an hour to an hour on Saturday nights, it seems...) I've been going through pages of old work, mostly from when I was actually officially studying writing at Oberlin. (I still have to locate a poetry journal or two.)

At Oberlin I had a particular poetry teacher who was intense, dramatic and you might say eccentric. I was always so overwhelmed by him and ultimately was happy to be finished with his class. For the past, oh, 9-10 years, I have hated almost everything I produced in his class.

Tonight I reread the three pages of commentary he wrote about my final project - a chapbook of the semester's work. I feel like it has taken this long for me to finally understand it. Suddenly I GET what was wrong with a lot of the pieces, but also see some of what was right about them. More importantly, some of the criticism he gave me then could apply today. Most of all, I am impressed that he treated me as having the true potential of being a professional poet, despite how hard it was to slog through the work that semester. Three pages of typed commentary (on a typewriter, not a computer)! That's great. And he kept telling me to stop asking readers to be gentle with my work.

Sound familiar from any blog entries I've ever made?