Poetry Talk

I'm in the process of editing my poetry collection. I've been putting it off for years, mostly because it got rejected from the one publisher I sent it to back in 2019 and though they gave me incredible feedback, I wasn't mature enough at the time to overcome the embarrassment that the rejection gave me.

I have since matured as a person and a writer. I have done a few performances since then and written some better poems that I've been sitting on for a few months. I've also been made redundant three times so being rejected for my work no longer absolutely ruins me.

But the weird thing about going back to editing my poems from the original collection is that I'm going over poems about people I haven't thought about in years, and situations I made my peace with, and reading over this work feels like someone else wrote them.

In a way, that's true. I was a very different person when I wrote those words, compared to who I am now. Even some of my fundamental beliefs have changed since then - though this is good, I've been reading and learning and growing as a person.

I think the weirdest thing is reading about heartbreak that I thought would be the end of me when I wrote it, and sitting in my little home office knowing that what I went through at the time was absolutely nothing in comparison to what was in store in the future. Stuff I would not only survive, but ultimately benefit from.

The distance in time between the writing and editing of these poems has ultimately benefitted them though. I can be objective, and bring new levels of technical skill to the raw emotion that created them. I'm also surprised at how much I've added to the narratives of some of them. I guess it's nice to see my hard work over the last five years paying off, especially since I've written less than I ever have before and struggled through a bit of a creative crisis of identity.

As for what comes next for these poems, we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

Don't tread on the flowers, F x