A Periodic and Never Ending Loop

A Periodic and Never Ending Loop

photo by AVR

I first put together and started to organize my poems when 3 things happened (before that they were only on scraps of paper, napkins, scattered in notebooks etc.).

1.      My friends and family expressed their continued interest in my writing and their dismay at only being able to read them from ragged looking scraps.

2.      I bought a computer, learned MS Word and so was able to print them and save them to diskette.

3.      I had a probable but unconfirmed micro stroke that seemed to only affect my memory and language skills (and only partially) and wasn’t able to work so I had lots of time on my hands to write new poems and organize the old.  This actually helped me in my recovery.

The second time I was compelled to repeat the process was when I was putting together the manuscript for my first book, “Dearest and Most Precious: A Love Journal”.  This time I was looking for all sorts of ragged pieces of paper as well as perusing diskettes for suitable material for this poetic prose, easy read glimpse into my private amorous life that was actually pre-ordered by a lot of people who had read parts of the manuscript.  I didn’t make money but I managed to break even and added quite a few new fans in the process.

Just recently, I became so tired of looking all over to find the poems for the “Shadows on the Carpet” manuscript that I have been working on consolidating and organizing my poems from various sources - several memory sticks, external hard drives (data saved whenever a computer crashed and burned)- to one folder on the computer with sub-folders.  And I put together poem lists by year, in the order of their matching numbers (at the insistence of a long time friend and fan, I took the time to arrange the poems by year and number them a few years ago).

Based on that, I found that I am missing 2 poems that I have no clue what the titles are and what happened to them - one from 2006 & one from 2007. I have looked through unrelated folders on all my media - where I found some that had been 'missing'. Also, I had stopped numbering my poems in 2011 but luckily I had begun dating them so I was able to number them. I still have 2012 to do. What a project and I'm still not done. I am still missing my diskettes and the poems on them, but I do have those as hard copies in 3 ring binders. Next I'll have to tackle the paper files (thrown into many different boxes) where I should have a copies of the missing poems as well as unfinished ones.

Because I love the feel of pencil (and sometimes pen) on paper, I start all my poems that way and then transfer to computer.  Unfortunately, this means that I will be going through this organizing process whenever I need to in the future – a periodic, never ending loop.