[ross hamilton hill]

I don't delete much, I'm more liekly to regret the-fly-by-night sentence or bon mot that comes to mind but is lost because i don't write it down, maybe it comes back later as another thought but I tend to think that it doesn't.
I used to destroy work, both poems and paintings and drawings, i regret it, a friend said "if it's worth doing its worth keeping' so these days I do just that.

[Mary McLean]

If you know I'm a scientist it won't surprise you to hear I have a spreadsheet...
retired 38%
published 20%
still hoping to publish 35%
still at draft stage 7%

The poems I label as retired are still on disk if I feel like returning to them later, but they are mostly pretty poor efforts, either from my early months of writing poetry or dashed off hastily for a contest like the Speccie. And a lot of the ones in the 'Still hoping to publish' category are a pretty forlorn hope. But I keep them around (and highlighted in red) because I think there is something in them, so they are worth either continuing to send out or maybe tinkering with further.

[John Whitworth]

I never throw anything away. I have thirty-three files of work, each file containing around twenty poems. That's about 660 poems. Plus the ones already in books, ome of which I have removed from the files. I reckon there must be close on 1000. And I still feel fine for another 1000. Larkin is suppsed to be a poet who didn't write much. But the latest collected shows hundreds of poems. And he died at 63, a young man. And he wrote novels too which cut into the poetry time. I mean how long does it take to write a poem, for God's sake?

[Michael F]

Thanks for all the responses, which I very much enjoyed reading.

One of my favorite things is reading about writers’ habits, like Miss Emily scribbling poems on the back of kitchen labels, and Frost sitting by the boiler writing in the quiet late at night, and lugubrious old Possum with his revisions upon revisions upon revisions… or even Papa Hemingway going up to his desk with a pitcher of Martinis… before lunch, IIRC.

And David R, nice to see you back.

[E. Shaun Russell]

Yes, like Nemo and others, I don't throw anything away. There's some material I wish I'd thrown away, but I'm a documentarian at heart. You never know when there's a scrap of a poem that you will stumble across years later and find a way to give it new life. I know of at least one instance of that personally -- I wrote "a paradise within a paradox" as part of a song lyric when I was sixteen or so, and wound up using it a decade later as the final line of a poem that was eventually published.

I don't write much these days, but I have a shoebox full of scraps of paper containing old poems, single lines, half-baked ideas etc. That shoebox has followed me around through eight or nine moves over twenty years, and I imagine it will continue to do so for decades to come.

[James Brancheau]

I think if you are evolving as a poet, you are inevitably tossing material.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

When just getting an ideas, I often write proto-poems on the margin of the book I am reading. They are usually really outside of comprehension. I trade my books in for others at the used shop. I like the idea of folks reading along and wondering what on the page might have induced such a strange bit of scribble.

I can hear a hum on Plum Island wondering if that last sentence might not be my working method in general. But it isn't so. I think I am a bit crazed by loyalty once an idea jumps in, I try to see it through. But not everything scrawled at 2 am is an idea. I usually know in the morning. If I can't remember what I meant and a blue yak is involved, it is not an idea but rather just a stray neurotransmitter having a bit of go.

[Michael F]

Andrew, I love that.

I buy almost all of my books second-hand, and I would be charmed someday to wander into a cloud of your idea-formation.

[Roger Slater]

It depends what you mean by "trash." Maybe the real question is how many poems do you bring to a first draft, or at least get close to a draft for, and then abandon as utterly hopeless and a pure dead end. For me, the answer is also "none," since I don't delete the file from my computer, and there's always a chance I'll come across it someday and think better of it.

[Wintaka]

Not enough, obviously.