trash to treasure literary
for the writers who may not believe in their abilities but deserve to
for the writers who have lost faith in their words
for the writers who self-reject their work before it’s given a chance
every writer has a piece of ‘trash’ we can treasure
“I rather like this poem, since it’s whimsical. But nobody else seems to like it, so I grudgingly tossed it into the cyber-scrap pile. A person can’t really relate to it unless they have a weird house with an orange bathroom.”
“These were written sometime between the 1985 - 1990 . This was back before the Internet and I was just beginning to try and share my work, navigating the world of postage and S.A.S.E. terminology. Back then I was even more thin-skinned so if a work was rejected or not returned it would be at least a year before I tried sending something out again, if ever. Of course, the critic's voice went for the easiest self-accusations when it came to what was wrong with the work: pretentious, trite, hackneyed, cliche, especially if a poem had an ekphrastic influence. In 1990 I moved geographically but it was not a cure for any of the hypersensitivity which went into my being creative, so it was a decade before I began sending work out again even while I kept on writing in secret. Even then the work sent was not from the earlier 80s, but selections stored from manilla envelopes written in the intervening years. Three years ago or so I came across the 1980s work that was typed (not sure if originally handwritten has been chucked) scanned them as Adobe PDF and revised after converting back to Word. Enclosed are three which went through that self-laceration process.”
“This poem was built painstakingly slow, written and rewritten line by line. I have a habit of leaning toward the melancholy in my art, and this was made with the goal of finding optimism in grief. Though I’m outwardly a bubbly person, it feels awkward to incorporate that into my poetry since so much of art praises “tortured artists”- as if you can only be deep by being somber.”
“Honestly, I really don't like the style of "I Am From" poems. This started out as something I wrote during orientation week for college, but after a couple of edits, I realized I really just didn't vibe with the way these sorts of poems focus on who you are relative to your past locations. As someone who's moved upwards of 7 times in the past 20 years, I'm not beholden to a specific location. Instead, I'm more attracted to the memories I have and what stories they tell about me. So, this version of an "I Am From" poem never saw the light of day.”
“I ‘trashed’ this piece because I felt that it would be difficult for others to relate to. Sometimes I like writing poetry that only I will understand. This piece happens to be one of these poems. While I enjoy this type of poetry, I do think it can be difficult for others to understand or grasp on to.”
“These are three poems from a map in my notes app that has been gathering both words and dust over the span of two years. They are strings of words, evocations of emotions that ran through me after a boy broke my heart. I always felt that publishing these somewhere would be too much and if he would see them, I felt like he would win in a way, certainly seeing how much I care in these poems, the hurt that runs through them. This boy turned out to be a very dangerous person who lied and emotionally abused me for a year, and I feel like all these words are an attestation to that, even if I wasn’t aware at the time. So, they gathered dust in my phone for a long time because I never felt that these specific ones truly rang out the sounds my voice was trying so desperately to sound out. I see now that they were trying to tell me something, that they were asking for help and I was ignoring myself. They might not be the best I have ever written, but changing them now after so long feels like altering the truth of what I was writing about at the time. The first poem was once supposed to be a song, but the words kept pouring, and no melody has yet found its way between the words.”