So there is nothing quite so wonderful and daunting as discovering almost 20 poems that you don’t have typed up into your archive.
I picked up a journal last week that had many of the poems I wrote from the year 1990-1996 including about 2 dozen that I have never typed up. The poems were flagged, so at one point I planned to type them up, but I obviously never did.
Most of them are from my days at University. Several of them came out of my main relationship during that time. This, in fact, is probably why I didn’t type them up at the time I was going through the process. My boyfriend from those years was killed in 2007 and I did most of my poetry transcription in 2008-09. I can see choosing to not deal with these poems at that time, when the rawness of his death still existed.
I’m glad I have found my peace with things as much as I ever will, because I truly enjoyed reading and typing up these poems, and look forward (after some serious edits) to sharing some of them. The time when we are at University, in our early twenties, can be such a unique and tumultuous time in our lives, and watching the person I was grow slowly, and sometimes painfully, into the person I would eventually become, is fascinating now that over 20 years has passed.
It is interesting timing that I find these while my poetry book is on hold due to ‘stupid computer problems’ (because don’t we all love it when the processor cable of our laptops comes disconnected). I can take the next three weeks to work on them, and pick what I want to include in the book.
So, to those writers and poets out there, you never know what you’ll find your inspiration in, it could be an old journal you haven’t loked at in over a decade.
Galen