Poetry Archive Series 2: Introduction
From late 2011 through early 2013, this blog had a series of posts I called the “Poetry Archive.” The list of poems I had posted here was by then of “daunting size,” I had seen an increase in subscriber counts in the relatively recent past (though there is of course no way to tell how many of those actually read my posts …), and I was desperate for reader input on what poems to include in my first collection (which eventually became A Year in Verse). In this series, each week I “featured” (linked to) a half-dozen or so poems from the archive, asking readers what they thought and which they liked best. At first I listed poems in the order I had posted them on the blog in the first place, but later on (after catching up to the present) I began selecting poems “for the Archive” by theme or subject.
It is now more than a decade later, subscriber counts are even higher (though “view” traffic and other engagement is significantly lower), I have probably posted more poems since the end of the first run of Poetry Archive posts than I had at the time I started it, and having published not only A Year in Verse but Dreams and Prayers I’m again in early thoughts of what to include in a third collection. So I thought I’d dust off this category and begin what I’m calling “Series 2” of the “Poetry Archive.”
In what I’ll now call “the first series,” Poetry Archive posts appeared every Thursday (possibly unless preempted by something like my annual Thanksgiving post), alongside the other “departments” of the blog that had their own days (poems on Fridays)—a post in every department every week that I had something for that department. These days I have rarely posted anything but poetry, at the slower rate of every other week or so, and to avoid the appearance that I’m actively posting to the blog “on company time” I usually schedule posts for Saturday morning. So this second series of the Poetry Archive will appear at that same time in weeks that a poem (or other post) isn’t scheduled.
In the first series, I basically took lists of poems and “divided them into more manageable groups,” so “Volume IV” was poems relating to “Love”, “Volume V” was poems relating to “Nature”, and so on. My method this time will be somewhat similar, in that I expect to present a group of poems connected thematically in each installment, but I do not expect to try to exhaust the list of poems relating to any one subject before moving on to the next. For example, in the coming weeks I will begin with poems related to Advent, winter, and Christmas.
My intention is to primarily focus on poems that are not included in my two collections. As part of preparing the collections, I polished many of those poems with edits and in a few cases fairly substantial revision, and the blog posts in which those poems originally appeared saw very few of those changes, so the way to see those poems in their best light is in my books. I may, however, begin or end some “Poetry Archive” posts by mentioning a poem that is in one or the other book.
For the purpose of selecting poems for a third collection my Psalm settings and Arthurian poems are a little redundant, as I intend for each of those to eventually become its own separate collection, but I will still include poems from those series in Poetry Archive posts as they fit the theme of the day.
Within each post, I hope that you will follow the links to the poems, read them, and let me know what you think—which you think is the best, which if any you would like to see in a collection, or maybe how you think a poem could be improved. At this point I have only the haziest of ideas for a third collection, so any suggestions from readers may well influence the direction that the collection develops.
The first “issue” of the second series of the Poetry Archive should appear “in this space” the first Saturday of December. I hope you will enjoy dipping back into my poetry archives.
