NEW: poetry and essays archive

Dear friends, subscribers, and people who take offense at my Guns n’ Roses references,

I wanted to point out that the new poetry and essays archive is now available on this site. It doesn’t contain all of my poetry and essays. Just the stuff that I like most.

Yeah, yeah, it’s presumptuous to self-publish poetry. With rare exceptions, it’s presumptuous to force one’s poetry on the world at all.

Of course I also sometimes think that all writing, both good and bad, is presumptuous to an extent. In in the meantime, I keep hearing from you about how much you like the stuff I publish here and have made the archive with that in mind.

By the way, a long time ago, when I was still a high school student, I noticed that the Norton Anthology of Poetry we used in English classes included the work of Bob Dylan. Norton was ahead of its time with this one. His inclusion, which forced me hard to think about the definition of poetry, in a way prepared me for his Nobel Prize (a lot of the writers I know seemed very surprised when he won, which in turn surprised me).

It also made me think about how genre and mediums and methods of delivery overlap in this world that we live in. In that sense, poetry isn’t something that has to be born on the page. Sometimes, in fact, a poem has to travel a certain path in order to be recognized as such. I think that’s curious and wonderful.

The world being what it is right now, curiosity and wonder should be multiplied. I’m trying to do my part, in whatever small, confused, confusing way that is available to me. Good luck with doing yours.