A Periodic and Never Ending Loop
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| 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.
