I have slacked off with my blog recently - not because I am lazy, but because I have been busy and I have been putting my writing energy into writing and editing poems as well as trying to send stuff out to journals etc. My Easter resolution was to be much more pro-active about submitting work and so far this seems to be paying off as I have already had two poems accepted.
Yesterday I printed a bunch of poems out to see if I had enough to put together a pamphlet sized collection. I find it really hard to know what to leave out and what to include - there is very little that I like of what I wrote at the art school and even of my MA work there are are only a few that I am really happy with. I wonder if I am too critical - the trouble with creative work is that generally as you evolve you go off your earlier work. I felt the same about my art work too and in fact I recently had a purge where I threw a lot of my old work away. I don't necessarily want to do that with my poems though, I suspect some of my earlier ones can be made better and maybe I will spend a bit of time trawling through them finding the ones that are worth saving.
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I doubt whether my experiences are typical nowadays, but I didn't think of putting together a pamphlet until I had 100+ poems published. When I did, I had quite a mix of old and new poems, and it was mostly old poems that were chosen.
Nowadays there are more pamphlet competitions and more mentoring schemes that lead to publication. And I suspect most people write more than 20 poems a year - my rate's not conducive to producing pamphlets without old poems in them. Judging one's own poems isn't easy at the best of times, but when they come from different eras it's especially hard.
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