If I suddenly died, my poetry files wouldn't make sense to anyone else...

Most of my poems seem to range from one third of a page to one half of a page to almost a whole page to a little bit longer than a page to a page and a half (with occasional exceptions that are shorter or longer). But the poem I'd been working on for a while and recently finished (at least for now) is almost three whole pages long (and at least somewhat different from my norm in other ways too). I'm not usually drawn to long poems, because I'm a slow reader, and so if I see a poem that's more than a page long, I'm less likely to dive into reading it if my time feels limited. But this poem of mine is a weirdo and is doing what it wants to do.

Somewhere in the process of working on this poem, I also started thinking about how my process has changed over the years. For many years, I wrote everything on paper until a poem seemed almost done; then I would switch to the computer to see how the formatting looked when I typed the words from hand writing to the screen. I'd make a few more revisions on the computer and then print out the completed poem. If I changed my mind later and made more revisions and then printed out the revised version, I'd still keep the previous version(s) on my computer and on paper with the previous version(s) stapled to the revised version(s).

In more recent years, I don't care so much about saving all the drafts of a poem in progress. I'm not saying I delete things fast, but if a poem in progress ends up turning into a very different poem, I don't usually have a problem deleting the earlier version and just starting over with the new version and so on and so forth. I do still print out a copy of every completed poem though, so they're not just on my computer. But the printed out versions are oddly organized, as are the online versions. I mean, I know how and where I have them organized, but if I suddenly died, my files wouldn't make sense to anyone else.

I'm not a very organized person in terms of how things are stored in my home OR on my computer. As far as my computer files go, I store and organize works-in-progress in various phases, but there's so many works-in-progress that I save while they're in progress and then forget to delete all those in progress documents. I do have a somewhat organized separate file for my completed poems though, entitled "Juliet POEMS".

I'm someone who has been writing poetry for over 30 years now, so if I saved all my drafts and in progress poems, my space would be inundated with works-in-progress, as well as documents from the past that I just never deleted or got rid of. It already is to a certain extent. I guess I'm in the middle with that sort of stuff and maybe I always will be. I most certainly don't desire to forget or ignore or delete the past (especially in terms of my poetry), but I most certainly do prefer to focus on the present.

On a semi-related note, another part of the reason I still have a lot of files, documents, and pieces of writing (most certainly not just poems) from the past is because I don't feel like focusing on a bunch of past documentation (such as old hand-written letters, old photos, old files, etc...) in order to decide what I should or shouldn't get rid of, because then my mind would focus on the past to make those sort of decisions.