categorizing your poems

Actually, I missed a big chance:

Absolute Poets' Collections - thread in Critique. You can post there, listing links to your poems. I keep mine updated. It was a very thoughtful initiative by William, and one I think could be a great resource if more people used it.

By month and year. When I was younger I had the idea that if I didn't write one a month then I was letting myself down, so I'd always write the month and year next to the title. Over time this meant the poems became fixed in time - I'd stop revising them because they'd been written by an earlier version of myself, so to speak. Changes in style and occasional pauses in writing meant poems written at a certain time tended to sit well together, so every year or two I'd type them all up - I had a big collection of foolscap I pilched from my dad which I used for years - put them in a big folder with a cool title and file it away as some sort of collection.

Not that I write enough for that to work these days, but that's a different matter. And you can't get foolscap anymore.

Everyone in this thread is far more organized than I. For years I had a stack of folders I carried around with me, in which there were multiple copies of poems I had once shared with a workshop I was a member of. Rather quickly the folders became chaotic because I would flip through and pull out one or several, place them in another folder for whatever use I was making of them (usually to read somewhere, or to copy and share privately or later in an online forum) and there those copies would stay.

I tried a few times to collate those and discard some of the many duplicates but each time gave up the task until last year when I finally got through it. I have slowly been typing these in to my computer, where they go in a single folder, for now, and some of them have also made it over to Google Drive.

As well, I post poems to one of my blogs, so there's another repository. But categorizing is not something my brain knows how to do with any ease at all.

Shadow_Ferret said:

They go in a folder called "Poetry."

Click to expand...

oh, dear. I'm not even this organized. For years, my poetry has been just for me, and it's mostly scribbled on notebook paper or the backs of envelopes and occasionally napkins or blank pages ripped from books. A few of are printed up; mostly because those were shared with a poetry crit group I belonged to a million years ago. All that stuff is in a box marked "writing", in no order whatsoever. I rarely toss it, but I never thought to organize it.

I'd shared nothing with other humans for years until I came to this forum. The stuff I've written since I took the plunge in here is in a folder on my computer entitled "poetry," except for the stuff I've done in the poetry game and prompt threads, which exists only on AW.

I categorize by form first, and then by basic subject, such as nature, love, humor, etc.

I don't e-mail myself anything. I simply store writing in several place, such as Google Drive, a backup hard drive, and a pair of DVDs.

I have some that go thematically. I have a collection with four chapters, and I need to rescue them from the old technology!

I have a folder named Poetry and Flashes with sub-folders, by title, for any poem that has more than a couple of drafts or submission letters and contracts. I wish there were more of those.

I also have notebooks with dated first drafts. Somehow I still hand-write most poems first.

I keep thinking about this, and I realise that I generally like my poems in a heap. I like finding them and rediscovering them by accident.

All my poetry volumes have bookmarks in them, and when a poem strikes me, I take one bookmark and move it there. I don't even shelve them alphabetically; I remember what the books look like.

If I want to get some insight into how a poet's work changed over time, I might organise them by date they were written/published.

In my entry in the Absolute Poets' Collections thread, I list the links by thread or subforum. I might note whether a form was used. But generally, I seem to resist organisation.

That probably reflects my approach to reading poetry: I usually don't go looking for, say, love poems, or poems about war. It's not the topic, but a key phrase that I'll want to recall.

It might just mean that I don't read or write enough of it. And I certainly don't mean that my way is best; it might be crap. But sometimes it helps me to think of entropy as a way to ensure that I'll keep rediscovering old favourites. Otherwise, I might never revisit a poem that didn't hit me years ago, but does now.

Rob, I am exactly the same as you. Heaps.