Poetry sorting machine

I brought my unpublished poems to Wyoming in the hope of sorting them out.

Sorting them out I'd hoped there would be more poems among them than there are.

More often than not the poems I'd thought were poems are not, and once-in-awhile poems I hadn't thought were poems are, or are much closer to a poem than most of the poems I'd thought were.

Sometimes when sorting poems interesting things happen all on their own

For instance, I'd written a rather long poem about a graveyard in eastern Washington state, the most forlorn, pitiful, neglected graveyard I'd ever seen. Graveyards are always a good subject for poetry, and I'd written what I thought was a good poem about a graveyard that even the dead would deplore. During the sorting process I began to think it wasn't a very good poem at all, that the long sonorous lines I'd written were acting like they were trying to outlive the poem itself, therefore killing the poem in the process. But I also felt the poem deserved to live, so I reworked it and think now that it has a good chance to survive--

At The Graveyard of Poems

Sad, each headstone here

looks like it's been workshopped

to death.

Most of my poems are short poems--no more than 12 lines--though there's one I'm thinking will make the cut that's well over 100 lines (3 typed pages) that I wrote four years ago in Wyoming. This poem was first titled, After Seeing a Bumper Sticker that Reads, Pray to End Abortion. Then, In Monster Dark. Now I think I'll title it, Caldera.

I've been at this for three weeks now, separating bad poems from good, and see that my good poems may be placed in three separate categories--Warm and Minimal; Confused Circles and Tortured Squares; The Untrashed.

Sorting through my poems I conclude that I am a good and diligent poet, but not as good as many other poets who are much better at playing the poet than I am.

Enough poems I've put through the poetry sorting machine have survived, so far, to make a small book of them. If I do make a book I'm going to title it In Order to Hear a Bare Sound, from a phrase of Heidegger I found in his essay, "The Origin of a Work of Art."

 Poet in studio, troubleshooting personal poetic documents by feeding them into the newly created Poetry Sorting Machine, Cody, Wyoming, July-August 2018.