[Jim Moonan]

For now and until it proves to be a worthless endeavor, I will start each day with a fresh, blank page. Anything I want to write that day will go on that page. No matter what. A quote, a thought, a title, a line, a start of a poem – all will go in the “soup” of that day. At any point if I want to lift something off that dated doc. then I will and give it it’s own page and start to work. It will be like giving birth (though at least half the world’s population would disagree), like being born.

[Gail White]

This is why you should never throw anything out: I was weeding out old stuff today when I found an issue of The Shakespeare Newsletter for May 1975 with a free verse poem of mine in it. The poem wasn't any good, but I thought the basic idea - the married life of Portia and Bassanio - had possibilities, and I turned it into a sonnet for my series on Shakespeare's women.

[Aaron Novick]

Very little goes into the trash (only the most wretched of my earlier poems, and even many of these are spared), but certainly substantially more than half I consider unworthy of attempting to publish. I don't trash them completely for basically the reason Gail gives: some of them may one day serve as the spark for something better than they themselves attain. And for some of them I feel a private fondness that is not worth imposing on the world's poor trees.