Finally, a poem I am happy with

After a week and a half of writing crappy poetry ("crappy" in MY opinion), I finally wrote something that I was happy with: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/60740810/

At first, I wasn't as affected by the poem. Sure, I wrote it for a "love poem" (which I've been writing a lot of lately), but just how much the poem moved me didn't happen until later. The reason? I later went back to make some changes to it. I wonder if fixing the other poems I wrote which I wasn't happy with would produce the same results, but right now I don't have any ideas on how to "fix" them. Perhaps they are "crappy" in my eyes but not in someone else's. I have not shown these poems to anyone else. It hasn't yet occurred to me to ask anyone to read them for feedback, mainly because I've been so focused on OTHER bigger projects at hand.

Still, this experience has reminded me of the importance of writing junk. As we writers say, "you have to write junk." Really, you HAVE to. You have to get that "junk" out of your system and over with. Get it written and get it out. You have to write the junk to make room for the good stuff. I never really understood how this works. I mean, if something is "junk" then why bother writing it at all? Well, we DO try to improve on it as we write it. So often we write/edit/critique all in one sitting. The kernel of an idea is there and that's all we need to work with to improve on something. We need to get that "idea" out, work with it and improve it.

And if we can't improve it, at least it is THERE. We got it onto paper. We can go back to fix it later...or it may never get fixed at all. Like my one poem I was able to fix. Like the other poems I couldn't fix. The point is, we wrote it. We gave it a shot. We tried to "save" it and improve on it.

But even if we can't improve the junk we write, at least we CAN allow for
more of the good stuff to come our way.