Late autumn reveals
oriole’s purse-like nest
constructed of my daughter’s hair.
Breeze touches 
what I cannot.
                                (November 2010)

~

I found this tanka-like poem, written when my daughter was away at college, among some old computer-based file folders I’ve been organizing. It’s one of many old poems of mine I’ve ‘rediscovered’ in the process of trying to keep my poetry systematized. Before I left my job at the university, I imagined that I would manage to organize and update my creative work files during the first year of retirement and keep everything in reasonable order once I had established a system. As if.

It’s not as though I haven’t made progress, made some brave efforts in the direction of archive and revision, culling and filing my drafts and “finished” poems (efforts that are both electronic and paper-based). The fact remains, however, that I do not possess the kind of mind that solves the keeping-track aspects of life very systematically; and, as writing remains a significant part of my life, it suffers from the same inefficiency. I admire artistically-minded people who can keep track of their work using logistically-useful methods that work for them. I’ve read their tips, their essays, talked to them about their systems, tried emulating them. Sometimes parts of their methods are helpful to me, but I lack something. Rigor? Ambition? Energy? The desire to spend the time required?

I keep writing, but I also keep falling behind at staying organized. And then there is the issue of technology constantly updating, so that a method I used in, say, 2015 is not available anymore…unless I invent a bunch of work-arounds. (My long-standing backup method is PAPER, and I still employ it, but I hate file cabinets and folders and don’t use them.) As for spreadsheets? I avoided learning to set them up during my entire career in academia because our department had a brilliantly capable office assistant who did that stuff for us, bless her heart.

All of which means that now and then I cannot locate a draft, a poem I want to revise or to send to a friend, or consider putting into a manuscript. Frustrating. And when I bought a new laptop, I had to decide what files to move from my old desktop; how far back do I want to go? Those poems from 1987, for example–eons ago, as far as computer system lifespans. Yes, I have hard copy from dot-matrix printers. Files originally in AppleWorks and Claris, files that lived on 3.5″ floppy disks. Copies I typed out on various typewriters through the years! Although I’m complaining about it, I realize that in some ways it’s really cool that my poems have undergone so many iterations in terms of tech. It means I have been around awhile and confirms the reasons I think of myself as a writer…and not as an efficiency expert.

~

P. S. I continue to write my drafts with a pen.