johnsonboy

I've been remembering the first time I sold a poem to a national journal. I was euphoric at the time and expected to make myself a career out of writing. I was a mere stripling of 30 at the time, and had aleady been publishing poems and stories in the local press for a while, most of them couresy of a sainted editor from Mendocino who more or less adopted me and has gone out of her way many times since then to help me out.
I was pretty dedicated to the idea at the time.
for a few years I had that kind of stuff in print somewhere in the U.S. pretty much all the time.
but it didn't really go that well.
I may have expected too much of poetry. Nobody really makes a living from it, do they? With the exception of creative-writing teachers, I suppose.

But their writing is often the most tedious and irrelevant type of stuff. I know too many MFAs and teachers who can't write for me to ever take that route seriously.
So instead I've concentrated on prose for the past few years. It's much easier to make money from.
But poetry...done well it's the best. it takes no prisoners, expects and offers no apologies, has no shame.

So it is with subdued enthusiasm that i report my latest publication, a bunch of new poems in the local poetry rag. I'll send a copy of it for free to anyone who e-mails me their mailing address, just in case anyone wants to see it.

I've just discovered that rag is one the web, at Sacramento Poetry Center. April issue, back 3 pages.