The past couple of weeks have been busy with outings and, in between, writing for many deadlines and trying to stay focused when the world outside is doing that beautiful May thing like populating overflowing lilac bushes and the sort of rain that just appears out of nowhere in the middle of an otherwise clear day. Springtime feels a bit more like springtime finally, and though I realize it may be brief (late May sometimes feels more like summer.) I am holding onto it. Our schedule of concerts and theater and movie screenings has calmed at least for the next few days, which means I have a little more time at night to get up to things like website redesigns, video editing, and hopefully knocking out something like a final set of press responses for books that will come out the latter half of this year. (which would be nice before we open up reading for next year at in June.)
Meanwhile, I am forging ahead on the set of poems I started on tail end of April poem-a-day in collab with this set of images, which are turning out to be some of my favorites in my adventures with the bots. When they are a little more done, I will probably either be sharing them on Instagram or throwing a few out into the wilds of the publication universe . Compared to many of my other projects, these seem better able to stand alone than some series where it feels almost ridiculous to try to place 1 or 2 fragments. No doubt there will be a slew of rejections coming my way (given the numbers game that is publishing.) But its worth a shot to land a couple in places other than my own platfoms and built-in audience (tiny as it is.)
I am still trying to get over my lonely little funk as a poet from April by trying to remember periods in my life where I took immense joy from writing regardless of audience or the chance that anyone was reading what I put there. In the late 90s when I first made the decision to do this strange thing, when I would draft out poems in notebooks and type them up on my word processor. Or in the days before social media when I somehow never minded the feeling that no one may ever read my work but focused instead on just making it regardless.
