How to Organize Your Poems

Hello and Happy Poetry Friday! Be sure to visit Dani at Doing the Work that Matters for Roundup.

It's Memorial Day weekend, and I've got organizing on my mind.

It's quite difficult, isn't it, to wrangle poems in our digital world... My files are haphazard at best -- the most consistent organizing I've done is simply by chronology of the year when I wrote the poem. So I have some "fat" folders with year labels... and files with poem titles, generally.

But that does nothing to help me find a poem when I need it! And here's the worst part: I CAN'T REMEMBER THE POEMS I'VE WRITTEN. Writing poetry for me is very much a "here and now" activity... which is great! Except for the fact that I can't remember what I wrote yesterday, much less last year!

glass bottles: my new
alternative to stained glass!

Anyhow, I decided to start chipping away at this problem, and I started with my blog. So... drumroll please.... welcome to my Poem Index! I gave it it's own tab and I *hope* to keep updating it regularly. We'll see. :)

Meanwhile, I'd love to hear suggestions on how all of you organize your home files? How do you find poems when you need them? How do you remember what you've written?

Wishing all of you a Happy Memorial Day!