Confession Tuesday

Oh my dear readers (if I even have any), I confess that I did not realize that people could not post comments on my blog, which is pretty darn stupid because I've had that exact problem with other people's blogs. It's a Blogger.com bug, I guess, and while I have no idea how to fix it with blogs that I am reading, I can at least (I hope) fix it with my own. So now hopefully people can leave comments, and if you can't, well, I don't know how you're going to tell me. I guess this is a problem, huh!

I confess also that despite my promise to myself that I was going to send out at least 3 poem packets on my Friday off (every other Friday, which most recently was last Friday), I did not have the things printed out I needed to. This was because there were huge printer server problems here at work beginning last Thursday, and most everyone spent the day without a working printer. Some people still do not have a working printer, in fact, but ours was back up on Monday, at least. So I waited until yesterday to print out my poems and cover letters and got the envelopes stamped and sealed up to go out this morning.

I've been taking a hard look at the work I'm sending out, trying to take advantage of downtime I might have at work, rather than throwing away hours and hours reading useless websites. I've been sending out Some of the poems for a number of years, and I'm wondering if they're worth continuing. Some I think I need to go back to revision on, especially if they're part of a series or if there's a few lines I still actually like. I think too that some of the old poems I have and maybe never sent out at all need to be sent out. And yeah, maybe I wrote it 15 years ago, but I have enough distance that I think if I saw it in a magazine having been written by someone else, I would like it a lot.

This is part of thinking about my own poetic style and what I'm going to put into a 70 page manuscript. I see different styles I wrote over the years and I'm thinking about how that relates to what I've written recently. It is a challenge to look at old poems with new eyes, but I think also that I might have tools now that can solve problems I didn't see before. There are new options, and I'm still learning.

What do you think? At what point do you stop submitting a poem that has been kicking around for years? Do you stick it in a drawer and forget about it or do you attempt a revision?