Honoring Your Past

Looking at your old work

Hey there friends. We are halfway through April and Global/National Poetry Writing Month. Pretty amazing that it is their 20th anniversary. Recently I have begun transcribing my old poetry that is just written down to digital form. Don’t worry I am keeping all of the old stuff in written form because that is how I approached poetry in the past. Now I write it on my various computers, yes I have a few. I have a Chromebook that I use when I go out to coffee shops or on road trips and I have the main computer that I am writing today’s post on and where I do most of my work. But when I began my poetic journey in 1988 I wrote everything down and read from my notebooks. Now my handwriting is not that great, yeah I should have been a doctor in my previous life, but I would try to read what I wrote in public from those notebooks. I did admire those who could read directly from memory, but my memory didn’t work that great so I used the notebook as a crutch. Now that my eyesight is not doing great, old age (okay I am 50) and MS (relapsing-remitting) really take a toll on my eyesight. So for about the past 3 or so years I have been reading from my phone. I type out the poem and put it in a folder on my cloud drive and I am able to read it in front of folks even in low light, love jacking up the brightness on my phone. That is where we are at today. In the past, I would have poo-pooed anyone doing that, but now I need to do it that way because sometimes the lighting at a venue is not great.

What Have I Learned About My Past

So my stuff goes back to 1988, do you know what you were doing in 1988, were you even born at that time? As you know from my last post, I was a Freshman in high school taking an honors English class because I wanted to play tuba in the orchestra and that was the only way I could get my schedule to work out. I wasn’t as world-wise as I am today, there was no way I could be, but I was writing poetry. I remember my first poem was to cheer up a friend at the time who was going through some rough times, as we do in high school. So I wrote it for him, but really it was for me to help me through the rough time I was having. I never showed it to him and maybe I should have let him know someone else was noticing him and aware of his presence. In high school, many of us felt invisible, and I know I did, some days I still feel invisible and I think a lot of podcasters feel that way when there is no response from the listeners. We get into an echo chamber and we fortune tell what is happening in our lives or what will happen and guess what, it does, no one listens to the podcast or responds, and well the bad stuff happens and then we just fuel the bad thoughts. Reading my old poems I am glad I am not that person anymore, I was a bit dramatic (okay yeah theater major here) and a bit self-centered. I am glad I keep those written words and dragged them with all of my stuff over the decades. I am glad I kept them over keeping all the CDs, cassette tapes, or vinyl. Music means a great deal to me and I can pretty much make a mix tape of my life with the music I have available, but I would rather make a mix tape of the music I know how to create.

So What Can You Learn From Your Past

I am not sure, because I don’t know your past. If you are looking for inspiration, look at what you have already created. If you haven’t created anything, then you must be brand new to the Earth and I applaud you for your excellent reading and comprehension skills, and how did you already get on the internet, it will rot your brain kid. You have created things in the past, maybe you didn’t keep them or maybe they were lost in a tragedy or someone else threw them out, but you have created things. Look back at them, learn from them, maybe improve on them, maybe make more of them, or maybe by looking at the past you can find your way to the future. Give it a shot. No promises about what you will create, but I can promise you one thing, if you don’t look back at the past, you won’t learn from it.

*All images created by Substack AI image creator, but idea input supplied by the author