I was just working on the poetry manuscript and decided to do some checking on what’s here on the blog.

Since 2003 when I started this blog, I’ve tagged 348 entries as “poems.” 128 of those were written since this time last year.

Another 37 are tagged as poems in other categories; there is some double tagging so that probably accounts for another 20 unique poems.

I don’t tag every single poem I post; only the ones I may do more with at some point get tagged so I can find them easily. And I didn’t start tagging poems when I first joined the site, so there are probably older ones back there in the deepest archives (I’m not that energetic right now to feel like checking).

So I’d estimate that there are around 500 poems on this blog.

Add to this the number of poems that haven’t been posted here (by which I mean more or less things written prior to 2003) and we’re easily talking 1000+ poems. I can vouch for at least 500 or so in various files and notebooks I’ve been keeping since 1974, still talking about just the ones I’ve bothered hanging onto for future work. That’s probably a pretty conservative estimate.

I truly hope at least 50 of them are worth keeping and possibly making it into the manuscript at some point, but I’m not hopeful.

When will it be enough?