--> lost poems

I'm sure all of you are familiar with that old story, perhaps apocryphal, about Ernest Hemingway losing all of his works. Whether the version of the tale you're familiar with involves him losing them in a Spanish bar, or in the back seat of a French taxicab, or in a field-hospital during the Great War, the grist of the story is this: Hemingway wrote a lot of things, and lost them. All. Typewritten. His only copy. Everything we have of his, so the story goes, is whatever else he wrote.

Now, whether this delightful little nugget of narrative has any truth in it or not, this story is a wonderful parable about something that happens to every writer: we lose things. We burn the only copy of a poem written about an ex-lover in a fit of rage. We accidentily use the bar-napkin on which a sudden jolt of inspiration was scribbled. Works disappear electronically and instantaneously, in a whoosh of electrons. I personally can think of over 20 poems I've completely lost, for various reasons, including stolen laptops, Internet Server errors on livejournals, and careless record-keeping.

What's strange is how much it hurts to lose a poem. I can't figure it. But it does-- I am quite literally haunted by the loss of several of my works that I'll never see again.

Why?

I mean, theoretically, I wrote them, so I could write them again-- or ones substantively similar. But the loss is crippling. It feels as if I managed to wrest something beautiful and worthwhile from the chaos of life and happenstance, only to have it yanked back into the abyss. It makes it difficult to write anything else; I become obsessed with either recreating the same poem-- which I know to be impossible-- or defeatist about the likelihood of anything else I write being as good. This fixation with lost poems can become quite manic-- I've torn through my old papers and notebooks like a madman looking for poems I lost years ago, knowing that I've already been through them.

Why?

I wonder whether it isn't like a little piece of me is lost. Or a little bit of the way I make sense of the world, at least.