February 9 , 2004 - I'm in Print!

It's built primarily off my graduate MFA thesis, which I put together in 1996. For my graduation requirements, I had to put together a book-length work.

The first section, "Blue Saint", comprises most of the older work. Those poems came out of a time in my life when I was dealing with a lot of difficult issues. One of them was what you might call troubled love.

Some poems deal with unrequited love, longing for someone unavailable. Then there are poems about my very troubled relationship with Leechboy, primarily about the breakup with him and the mixed feelings I had. The title of the book comes from a poem by the same name, in which I am looking at a painting of St. Sebastian and thinking about that situation.

Another overarching theme in the first section has to do with mortality, in particular how it relates to my own family, my grandparents. And then there were questions about living in an imperfect world, in an imperfect body, and how you deal with that.

When I completed my thesis in 1996, I was just beginning to write the poems that would fit in the second and third sections of the book, which move towards healing and transcendence. I couldn't have written those poems while I was in grad school, because I had only just begun to go through the healing process.

The second section is called "A Healer's Work," and this is one small poem about my my mother's father, whom I always called Pop-pop. It's about the last few weeks of his life, when basically his medical conditions, which he had hidden from us, including possible throat cancer (though we were never able to determine that), caught up with him. The stress on his body was so severe that he lapsed into dementia and had to be hospitalized. He died three weeks later.

The poem tells the story of how I would visit him in the hospital in the daytime and then at night would have very vivid dreams about trying to heal him.

The third section, "Inside We Are Bliss," looks at the various spiritual and emotional forms of healing: ranging from writing to yoga to taking advice from a hippie mystic to coming to terms with the fact that we are mortal, we are imperfect, and yet there is still beauty and hope in the world.

I ended the collection with the poem "Song of the Seeing Eye Dog," which got an honorable mention in a contest sponsored by the Pennsylvania Center for the Book. This poem looks at the bond between a seeing eye dog and her human. It seemed an appropriate way to end the book because it answers the question of how we survive in an imperfect world.

The poem was written from the dog's point of view, which was a challenge, forcing me to be more creative with language. It was inspired by having seen a woman and her seeing eye dog and noticing how they were almost one organism, the way they communicated with each other. It seemed to me to be a great show of love.

As I mentioned, I wrote a good number of other poems in that time that simply wouldn't fit with this collection. I've written a number of what might be considered experimental poems that would fit better with each other than with anything in this collection. I've also written some humorous poems which didn't work with what this volume was doing.

And more recently, I've written a number of short poems inspired by the sparsity of Japanese poetry. Again, they didn't quite fit with the themes in this collection.

My next focus will be on completing a book of selected columns from my newspaper days. I've been working on that for some time now, but there's still quite a bit that needs to be done to complete it. And perhaps I'll also look at putting together another poetry volume.

I just love this age we're in, this Information Age. While there are drawbacks, such as overexposure and such, the Information Age offers many possibilities to the independent publisher.

For years, I had wanted to start a literary magazine like Wild Violet. But to do it in print, you have to have quite a bit of money to do it properly. We would have been a "little" literary magazine, restricted to a circulation of about 500-1,000. And even though something like that can get you some attention, it doesn't get you anywhere near the number of readers. Perhaps if you can get it in a library, you'd get some more readers, but that was certainly not ideal.

But as the Web came into being and there began to be respected Web publications, not just sloppy, amateurish ones, that's when the idea for Wild Violet took hold.

The same goes for self-publishing. I had never considered it before because of the huge amount of overhead required for a professional looking result. Plus, if you don't sell the books, you end up eating all that cost.

It seems to me that it would make a lot more sense to have a print on demand situation where only the number that are actually wanted are printed up.

I also hesitated to self-publish because of the whole idea that self-publishing is somehow worthless, that it's a pathetic out to take if you can't get a publisher interested in your work.

But independent publishing is not new, of course. The Beats, thanks to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, put out their work on his City Lights imprint. In those days, it would have been difficult for them to get their work published by the mainstream press.

As I told many of my friends already, the reason I did this now was that I felt I wanted to get my work out there and let people read it, perhaps generate some interest. But I also thought it was important, since my poetry has changed, to be able to close this chapter and move on to a new phase of my poetry writing. When I do approach a publishing company with a manuscript, it's likely to be one that reflects my more recent work.

Now of course, I'm beginning to ponder different ways of getting the work out. I think that in addition to doing online promotion, I'll look at doing poetry readings and book signings, perhaps this summer. I'm happy to take suggestions from anyone who wants to e-mail me.

This book was a long time coming, and I feel good that it's finally here.

Moral:
There's no shame in doing it yourself.