This summer I took a poetry workshop at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. It was a lot of fun and I’ve enjoyed having a new outlet for writing. I’m going to take the workshop again in the fall, but in the meantime I’ve been pondering a couple of questions as a newbie amateur poet.

What to do with my poems when they’re “done”? In a sense I’m writing for myself but I also have an urge to share them. Maybe I just want to be told they’re good — even if they aren’t. Egos are fragile 🙂 I did some research into the idea of submitting to literary journals but after submitting a few poems it seems like a lot of work for not much gain. And do I really feel a need to be officially published? I’m not sure I do. I’m thinking for now I’ll just post a poem on this blog when I feel like it. Maybe people will see them or maybe they won’t.

Is a poem really ever done? It seems like it’s finished when I run out of ideas to improve it, but then if I take it to a workshop group I can always get more ideas 🙂 I’m going to post poems that I feel happy with at the time I post them but I’m not sure that will mean they are finished poems. Perhaps, like humans, poems can always be improved upon.