Poetry

I remember being in elementary school, and being assigned to do poetry. I always dreaded this, because I felt like I wasn't good at poetry, didn't really know how to compose a decent piece of this writing form. Not many poems interested me to read, either. I just wasn't the sort of person who was much into poetry.

This feeling continued on until around high school, or maybe it began to change around junior high. Anyway, there came to be a time when I started feeling that perhaps the poems I created weren't so bad, a time when I actually came to find some enjoyment in poetry and would willingly write poems in my free time. It's interesting to think of, now, considering that I've now written over a dozen poems on my volition that I feel rather satisfied with, even going so far as recently sending four of them to a magazine in the hope that they'll be published. The only trouble with my desire to have some of my poems published as that I have to find some that are short enough to be accepted. It's kind of funny that a magazine accepts poems of fifty lines or less in length, and some of the poems I have exceed that. Even in poetry, I tend to go on forever. Yes, the person who once had little interest in poems now has a great number of poems, most of which go on for a great number of lines.

At one point in my search, I came across a place that had no limit to how how long the poems could be. I'd like to say that I exploded in ecstasy, then sent them a ten-foot long scroll filled with words, but that, unfortunately, did not happen. It was a company that prints various secular magazines, and somehow I didn't think that any of the four thousand Christian poems I'd written would be what they were looking for. In fact, a good portion of my poems are religious, and often it's the religious poems that are the longest. Of course, the fact that I tend to look at the works that do meet specifications, and think, Nope. Nope. Not that one. This one needs to be edited first. Nah, that one isn't good enough, may somewhat affect the fact that I haven't sent anything to them yet. What can I say; I write long things, most of them have religious themes, and I'm a perfectionist who sometimes has trouble feeling that something is good enough. That's also why I haven't gone back and edited my manuscript too much; I keep feeling that my writing stinks, I need to edit huge parts of it, or I should start over with a new draft.

So, uh, if anyone knows of a Christian magazine that accepts insanely long poems, feel free to tell me about it. Until then, I'll just have to settle for battling perfectionism, editing things I feel need editing, and sending in the less lengthy of the poems.