I keep a file on my computer that I call the poem boneyard. This is where poems that I just couldn’t make work but didn’t want to give up on go for a long rest. After all, rest is a good solution for most of life’s problems. I find it especially true for poems that don’t cooperate. With enough sleep, they may have more energy when I come back to them. I’ve been feeling drawn to revisiting these old poems to mine them for new work lately. I’ve also been thinking along these same lines about other ways of collecting words that I either already have or that exist around me. I’ll tell you some of the fun things I’ve been doing.
First, I go to my file of disobedient poems and I copy and paste lines that speak to me. I add them all to a new file and then print the pages out. I then cut the lines out that seem to relate to one another and play with their order and placement. I also like to turn to old magazines to cut lines or words out that I can use to fuse with my words. This is helpful to flesh out the poem by insuring you have enough content to work with. I can’t explain to you how this madness turns into something meaningful except to say, try it for yourself. It often leads to some really cool new poems.
Another thing I started doing this year was keeping index cards with me and writing down fragments of experiences or things I heard people say that were intriguing. It’s sort of a field collection of words and moments from my life. I then tuck them into the back pocket of my moleskin journal and will take them all out at the end of the year to make a poem or multiple poems with them. The fabulous thing about this is that it will be a big surprise when I look at them.
Another fun thing that I have done in the past is to cut up my childhood composition books and make poems with them. This is really fun, and challenging because of the simple and limited language. Doing this really felt like a conversation between my child self and my adult artist. It’s a way that they get to work together. If you don’t have school work that was saved from your childhood you could do this same thing with old letters or cards as well.
Saving words and reusing them is a fun way to give yourself something to start with in your writing. You get to take on the role of the collector or in some of our cases the hoarder. All that stuff you’ve saved gets to have a new purpose. Sometimes I think that maybe we knew we would use the words later. In that sort of Quantum physics way, perhaps we are always in conversation with every age we have been or will be. Imagine, there is a future you who will want to cut up her old emails, love letters, grocery receipts, movie tickets, etc. and turn them into a beautiful poem.