I found this readable editorial very intriguing. Mark Anthony Owen believes quite simply that his poems hold up better in collections of his own work, that a reader can get a false impression of his work when they read one poem singly in the context of multiple poets.
Do you have similar experiences and stories? I would love to know your thoughts, especially if you have put a collection of your own together or even considered it.
I am in the consideration stages now. Although I continue to improve with practice and may yet be too raw for serving, I have been playing with a collection of childhood poems to be called "Feeding the child" or something like. Many of my poems mine my childhood in ways that seem premeditated but that keep surprising me--and feeding me. Unexpected poems arise prompted with a spark, perhaps, from one of my poetry workshops*. And while I have a few poems that gloom about the discomforts of being a child, there are an amazing (to me) number of pleasures: a climbing tree, story time, a cold forehead, roasting marshmallows, a table, a dream.
*I post with five word-work-shop blogs: I am a member of Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads and Poets United, and participate in dVerse Poets Pub, Theme Thursday and Haiku Heights. I can recommend others I have participated in as well. I leave my poems up on my poetry blog only for a few days, keeping them unpublished just in case I want to publish them in other venues.
