In the last week of January, I started my Picture to Page series where I wrote and published a poem every Monday afternoon along with a photo I took to inspire each poem. It doesn't look like I missed a week.
The downside? I now have nearly fifty poems I can't just send out to journals or other publisheres. A while back, a poetry group on Facebook was giving me guff for publishing so much work, saying he'd like me for send this work out instead.
My first thought was, What do you think I'm doing on top of this? But my reaction aside, they had a valid point.
This year will go down as the year I gave so much work away. In the past, it has led to good things. And doing this series has led to some of my most read work on this blog. I don't know how "Monday on the Bench" has gotten so many hits, but it has. So many hits, I ended up going back to re-edit the piece out of self-consciousness. But beyond this, will all this work be dead? Who could reprint all this with photographs? Who would want to? Not to mention there are many pictures not good enough to publish in a book.
The closer I got to the end of the year, the more I second-guessed myself. I've since written poemsbased on photos I've taken, but I plan to send them out instead, without photos.That means even if this project hurt me in the long run, at least it's gotten me to write more.
As of this writing, the picture above does not belong to anything published yet. I started out this series with too many road pictures, because they always look good to me, no matter how limited a photographer I am. I made sure to diversify my shots, but I decided to use this picture for tomorrow's poem, the last for this year.
Will I start up again next year? You'll have to check out this blog on January 6 to find out.
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