I have written over 136 poems in my brief life as a poet.

In addition to the exactly 136 that I just pulled off of websites to which I have posted over the last couple of years, there are probably a dozen or so that reside solely on my hard drive at home. I can't count them right now because I'm not at home.

In addition to both of those sets, I would guess that I have about 40 or 50 (at least) completed "songs," which I wrote over the years, beginning in high school and ending in college, when I switched to fiction.

That's about 200 poems. 200 pieces of complete verse, in one form or another. Pretty impressive, at least to me.

I have no way of telling if any of these are any good. I wasn't a poetry student, and the poetry of which I am a fan tends to be pretty unstructured stuff; very subjective. I do know however that over the last few years, as I've been informally browsing various poetry sites and publications, that there are many poems of mine that I'd rather read than some of the stuff I've seen published. And, even looking at some of what I consider to be my better work, I feel like it flows pretty well, is a little witty, and is relatively interesting.

I have a lot of free time on my hands at the moment. I've just started a job which isn't very demanding right now. In addition to compiling all of my poetry into one document which I still need to organize a bit, I have already created a "Submission Log" so I can keep track of the writing pieces that I send into different publications.

My next step is to compile all of my short stories, although I'm not sure if that requires more than just keeping all the Word documents in one place. We'll have to see.

So, I'm prolific. I guess. It's possible it's all crap, but at least there's a lot of it.


- posted by seanmh @ 1:11 PM