Tonight, fighting off boredom, too early to sleep, and following weeks of culling and cleaning out cabinets and boxes from far too long ago…I started looking at old poetry.

I want to assume that with rare exceptions, most poetry one looks back on is generally embarrassing. So far it seems that 1 in 17 poems is actually good. But wow, so many of the rest are hard to read through. Some great imagery, some great closing lines (I feel like closing lines were my forte), but overall, ugh.

So I started deleting old poems tonight.

I can immediately think of seven people who would think this is a crazy idea. None of them are here anymore.

It’s an exercise in self-honesty (in turn, a releasing of the grip of self-deception) to read something and say, no, this was not very good.

I write that, but then the next batch I looked at had several pieces that are pretty tight. So what do I know about recollection?

To be continued…