I’ve been gathering and fiddling with Poem poems for a collection Arnold Skemer is going to publish later this year. I’ve found around 25 that weren’t in the collection of Poem poems Geof Huth did and seemed to desrved to be in the new collection, but will probably go with only 19 or 20 as a few seem out of place with the others–not that there’s much of a theme binding them all.
As I was doing this, I got curious as to how many Poem poems I had on hand. I’d found only thirty or so. I figured I should have or four or more per year since the first collection. So I checked the date of the latter–and found to my dismay that it was published late in 1995–14 years ago. Since then I’ve averaged only about two Poem poems a year. I did know that I’ve have slow years but I thought I’d had a few good ones to make up for it.
I continued hunting for Poem poems, finally finding a few more in a file of old poems I had forgotten I had. One or two weren’t bad. I also came across this:
It’s a visual poem I made for some project of Crag Hill’s that either never came off, or came off without my poem. I think it’s unpublished even at my previous blog. I quite like it. Another pice of mine I came across is this:
I’m posting int now not because I like it but because I can’t figure it out. I understand that columns with letters running down them in alphabetical order keep going until they line up in such a way as to spell winter, but . . . Okay, now I see that winter causes the alphabets to restart downward. The year is chaotic until winter occurs by accident, and it imposes some kind of order on it. But what has that to do with Stevens? And why wouldn’t spring get things in order? Why are so many of the columns on the left so random.
I should write notes to myself about some of my creations. Actually, I’ve made a few poems I wrote notes to msyelf about, but the notes didn’t help. I suspect that if I don’t pretty fully understand what I’m up to in a piece as soon as I’ve made it, I never will. Nor will anyone else. Yeah, I know–even if I understand one of my pieces, it’s unlikely anyone else will. I expect quite a few people to be able to understand the top one in today’s entry, though.