Beginning Again

83 º ~ a front is lingering over the state and keeping us from reaching trip-digits for the next few days, highs still in the 90's though and 100 in the forecast for next weekend

Today has been about resetting the daily routine to the academic calendar.  Students have populated my online classes and I'll greet my on-campus students tomorrow.  That means, the desk of the Kangaroo will be occupied on MWF mornings before office hours, prep work, and grading kick in.

I wasn't sure how this morning would go.  Yesterday, I tried to work with some of my summer poems and I just felt like they were all trash.  I stopped trying to work with them after about an hour, afraid I'd do more harm than good with that mindset.  I'm glad I did.  Today, I started over.  I picked up a poem I'd ripped out of a journal during our vacation last month.  (Check out this post for an explanation.)  I hadn't even made it to the second stanza when I felt a shift in my brain and I suddenly knew what I needed to do to two of my own poems to make them work.  With that, I was off on a revision binge.

In part, I know I need to get into this revision mode with some real fervor.  Yesterday, I noticed that I only have 2 submission left outstanding (both from March), and of those 2 submissions, only 2 poems are still available.  Yikes!  This is not to say that I'm a slave to the submission process, but having a few sets of poems out in the world reassures me that I'm on an even keel.  This could be a mistake if I were to rush poems out there that weren't ready for an editor's eyes, and I confess, I've made that mistake in the past.  However, as I've matured as a poet, I think I've gotten a better grip on holding poems back until they are more fully capable of standing on their own.

With all that being said, I did send out one submission this morning.  That was a warm-up.  I hope to spend this coming weekend hip-deep in journals and poems and submission guidelines.