Wednesday, September 21, 2011

I can't decide what to do about the handful of poems (forthcoming in the new collection, Same Old Story) that no journal seems to want to publish. Do I just keep sending them out? Do I publish them here? Do I forget about them for three years till the book comes out? Do I decide that they're not really very good poems and delete them from the collection? Do I grit my teeth and mutter, 'But I like them,' and keep them in the collection anyway?

I also can't decide what to do with the box of canning tomatoes ripening on my porch. Do I cook them, and then puree them, and then boil down the puree into catsup, for a sum total of three half-pint jars after an entire day spent cooking? Or do I settle for five more quarts of plain old tomatoes? Either way I have to scald and peel them, which makes my hands burn and makes me wonder why I spent $12 for the so-called pleasure of home canning. On the other hand, there is hardly anything more beautiful than a row of shelves lined with glass jars of tomatoes, pickles, and jelly.

Well, if you have any answers, let me know.

3 comments:

Ruth said...

Tomato passata cooked with basil or curry spices and used for amazing soups all year long. One suggestion anyway....keep the poems.

Carlene Gadapee said...

perhaps it's one and the same; what we have a superfluity of, we don't want to discard. We feel honor bound to keep/can all we can. Keep the poems; they are parts of who you are. Tomatoes? At some point, we need to know what to do with them. Discard? Donate? Render down into sauce and jar it? Or just have one hell of a fun/messy afternoon chucking them at the boys. =)

Anonymous said...

Where is it written that every single poem in a collection must be first published in a journal? That said, keep sending them out. I just had two poems picked up that I was in despair of ever placing. But I like them. And huzzah, at last another editor likes them too.

So I say keep sending them, and perhaps you'll hit on the right home for them between now and your pub date.

And is there a greater gift than your own tomato sauce in the middle of winter? (says she who has no garden and has canned nothing in all her days...)