Elementary, my dear Watson...

Did you know that most journals and magazines consider stuff that has been posted as part of a personal blog* to have been already "published". And, as many literary-minded outlets won't take materials that have been previously published, anything I post on here won't be publishable anywhere else. I'm essentially giving it away for FREE! (Mother would be so disappointed.) So, for an ambitious writer guy like myself, trying like a thief in the night to break into the heavily guarded world of PROFESSIONAL POETRY, any words I give away without getting paid, or even a legitimate publication credit** could be looked at as either a sign of desperation, mental instability, or both. So, WTF am I doing here?

Like so many of my other projects (ie: the PHANTOM CONVERSATION and RIP IT UP zines, the M.A.R.S. PROJECT postal art correspondences and Bar-B-Q-slash-Art Shows, CAPTAIN GREYBEARD'S ETHERWAVE RADIO SHOW, the many years of live deejaying in various cities, my decade long love/hate affair with academics, and the mountains of poetry, collage works, various online personaes (perosni?) and other blogs that have come before this one) this is another attempt to connect with people in the real world, in a real way. I don't know why I think this will work any better than my earlier experiments, but that's the thing about us crazy-types, we keep plugging away at the impossible until we beat it or get dead. And I ain't dead yet, (misquoting SKINNY PUPPY.)

Do I expect a lot of people to read this? No. Do I hope that a few people will who might actually enjoy it? Yep. Will I become bitterly disappointed in just a few months (or weeks or days) and move on to something else? If history teaches us anything... (This latter point is debatable. In my opinion, "history" is what we call the stories we make up about things that have happened to us or are happening to us right now. If nobody makes up a story about what's happening, while it's happening, or directly afterward, then no "history" is created. And I think that is an important point: History doesn't HAPPEN; HISTORY IS CREATED.)

Where am I going with this? Nowhere, really. Just 'round and 'round, (misquoting both RATT and NEW ORDER) like a ride at an amusement park, but that's not so bad, is it? Who doesn't like a ride on a merry-go-round or Ferris wheel or a nice stroll along a well worn path, revisiting sights we've already seen a million times? I don't know. Ok. Your turn. Write about something that interests you and send me a link. I'd love to take a look.

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*(I hate the word "blog", seriously; it sounds either like somebody throwing up or a particularly dirty sexual reference.)

**(Even though many notable poets and self styled crazies self published their early manuscripts, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, the Dadaists, Surrealists, and Situationists come quickly to mind, self publication is still usually seen as a sign of amateur-standing, if not a straight up masturbatory exercise. Not that Whitman would have argued...)