Should I "Do Something" with My Poetry?

One of my writing goals for this year is to take my lifelong love of poetry and to "get serious about it" and "do something with it." 

I loved writing poetry as a child. In my very first book, written at age six, I included an advertisement at the end for a future "big book" of "POWATREE." 

I wrote huge quantities of poetry throughout elementary school, junior high, and high school, many of them love poems to the poor persecuted boy with whom I fell in love on October 17, 1967, such as this one, dated October 3, 1968, the fall of my freshman year of high school:

The leaves are bruised with scarlet,

The sky is seared with blue;

The hills are wrung in purple,

The grass is weeping dew –

To leave with all that agony

They must have loved you, too.

But then, as an adult, I pretty much stopped writing poetry, until I began attending an annual poetry-writing retreat held each January, first in a country inn in the Poconos and then in a convent in New Jersey, where attendees greeted the new year by writing poetry for a glorious weekend under the direction of various guest teachers.

The poet teachers were all wonderful, but the one who influenced me most was Molly Fisk. Molly celebrated sheer creative generativity: making something, sharing something. She enforced a $5 fine if we apologized for our poems before sharing them. She prioritized appreciation over critique, generally receiving each poem read aloud simply with a quiet "Thank you." In the online poetry groups she facilitates, in which I've participated many times since then, she in fact bans critique, or even "helpful suggestions." This has proved an excellent environment for me to flourish as a poet.

Now, however, I'm wondering if I want to try to publish some of my poems... share them not just with a small circle of fellow poets or friends, but with the wider world. But will this spoil the joy I've had in writing poetry just for the sake of writing it? Will this put me back into the trap I recently escaped of breaking my heart over letting myself care too much for writing's external rewards?

The rewards of publishing my poems, were they to come, would be small in any case. The places that would accept my work are almost guaranteed to be publications that pay only in copies (if "copies" there are - most are now online only) and attract a readership that may be only in the single digits. A well-published friend, who has published her own poems in over a hundred different venues, told me to expect, at best, a rejection to acceptance ratio of 15:1. If I should dream of publishing a book of my poems, even the extremely modest dream of selling a hundred copies may be doomed to disappointment.

So: why do this? 

Well, the very smallness of the payoff in terms of fame and fortune would bring some security from being carried away by crass ambition. Though even in Molly's online group, I find myself coveting not only "like" emoticons on what I share, but heart-shaped ones... or even - gasp - a morsel of praise from the lips of Molly herself. I can't seem to get past caring whether somebody else on this earth gives a warm welcome - or an ESPECIALLY warm welcome - to my little poem children. 

In any case, for better or worse, I've decided to do it. I submitted a first batch of poems this past week, and I plan to submit one batch a week for the rest of the year (where these can include poems recycled from previous rejections). And maybe one of these days, I will be a PUBLISHED POET, and that will be a fact I can cherish for the rest of my days. I'll be able to share my PUBLISHE POEM on Facebook! And then fifty of my friends will like it, and some will love it, and maybe some will even choose to share it with others. 

I think I owe this effort toward publication to the POWATREE-dreaming child I was. 

In a month daffodils will start to bloom.... and maybe some of my poems will bloom with them.