Both POEMS:1995 and POEMS:1996 have 250 pieces each, and as these are the 9th and 10th volumes so far of that chunk of time when I was writing 250 poems per year, that brings the big "poems in (potential) print" total to 2,500 spews of my angst. WHICH YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO READ ... DAMMIT!
Over the past few nights I've been having "process" nightmares about this project, being that I'm running out of material that was organized over the past couple of years. I dug into this today and found that I actually have poems on-hand (from a chunk of files I'd found on an old HD), going through 2003 (with some from 2004). I wrote 250 poems in 1997, but the "wheels fell off" after that ... although I was OCD enough to make sure that the total I wrote from 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001 came to 250 - so there will be a volume covering those four years. Things, however, get "messy" on either side of those 12 volumes (3,000 poems worth), and I'm going to have to do some serious archaeology - both in the "digital" and "boxes of stuff" varieties - to get as near a "complete" collection as I'm likely to have.
Needless to say, time is not my amigo when dealing with the 70's-80's stuff ... although I did hand-copied collections "back in the day" for 1976-1980, 1981-1982, 1983, 1984, and 1985-1986 (only 1984 being a 250-poem year of those). Obviously, I'd LOVE to find the original files (on 5.25" floppies in the PFS:Write format) for those, but, lacking that, it would be GREAT to find my copies of the old books (I kept 2 and sent out 10 for each, if I recall correctly), which could be scanned, OCR'd, and be good-to-go. This is also the period of my first six "chapbooks", so it's stuff that's pretty much "important to me", and I'd be crushed to have that all evaporate into the gaping maw of the pre-web memory hole.
On the later years (pretty much anything past 2001) ... I'm just hoping I can find the floppies - which should be 3.5" discs possibly in WordPerfect format. My "keeping track of stuff religiously" phase seemed to have gone pfft around 2004, so I don't really know what's out there. I see that for a while I was writing in small - 2x3" - purple notebooks ... and was eventually typing those up and posting them HERE back in mid-2006. But it appears that the poems themselves were from 2002-2003 and that I was only getting around to typing them up several years later. Then it looks like I started posting whatever I wrote, as I wrote it, in LJ, so there's a smattering of poems from 2006 and a handful from 2007 ... but, again, nothing organized. I recall having a particular disk file with those disks in it, and I'm hoping that all with be in there when I find it (I had a bookshelf collapse behind my desk - which is where I had that stuff - and it all was more-or-less unceremoniously dumped into a box to get later re-filed ... that "later" not having come as yet). ARRRRGH - this is why I'm having nightmares!
Anyway ... I am at least making an effort to plug this stuff. Sure, you're used to hearing whatever from me about whatever I'm involved in, but I also set up a Facebook page to flog this stuff there, and I just signed up to share a table space with the IWOC (Independent Writers of Chicago) group at the Columbia College's upcoming Book Expo ... an unexpected bonus to re-upping my membership with them. Here's a promo bookmark I've done up for the occasion (that's front-and-back, and not one long card, ya goof!):
I figured that bringing one "sample book" and a bunch of propaganda was the best approach, since those books are BIG suckers (8.5x11" and more than a half inch thick), and having all TEN of them on hand would end up "Bogarting the table" no doubt. Of course, it's pretty delusional to think that anybody is going to pick up the bookmark and go rushing home to order some of the books ... unless they've been hopelessly suffering from being in too good a mood and want to borrow some of MY anguish to help them even things out.
