Between 2004 and 2010, I wrote a lot of poems and posted them on PoemHunter under James Callos Jordan. Then life moved on, and so did I. Somewhere along the way, I lost the login.
That page is still out there at poemhunter.com/james-callos-jordan/, and it’s going to stay there. Without the credentials, I can’t edit it, update it, or take it down. For a while that bothered me. Now I think it’s fine. It’s a snapshot of who I was back then, frozen exactly as I left it.
But I didn’t want the only copy of my own work sitting behind a door I can’t open.
How they got out
With no account access, there was no export button to press. What I did have was the PoemHunter e-book of my page, which collected everything in one place. That became the source for the move.
All 78 poems are now in Marginalia, each with its original date so they sit where they belong in time rather than all showing up as new. They’re tagged PoemHunter Archive so you can read them together.
One small change
They’re signed James Callos now, the name I actually go by. Same person, shorter byline.
Two homes, one voice
So the poems live in two places now. PoemHunter keeps the original, untouched. Sidequesthings keeps the copy I can actually look after: fix a typo, add context, or just reread without needing a password I lost years ago.
Reading them again was strange in the best way. Some made me wince, some made me smile, and a few still hit exactly like they did back then. I left them all as they were. They were written by a younger me, and he deserves to be heard in his own words.