Poetry Only As Old As You Feel

The Poet as Methuselah

—for Joe Hutchison

Honestly, I’m an old man

But I’m not really

That old.

I was just

Feeling my age when

These lines came to me,

Forever young.

The Intricate Evasions of As, Selected Poems, 1985-2010

In between swimming and relaxing, most of my creative energies these past five days were spent trying to come to terms with a manuscript (see photo above, courtesy of Eleni) that I’ve been wrestling with over the past 25 years and which has burgeoned from a chapbook of about 40 poems to a monster ms. now comprised of approximately 120. I don’t even want to think about how many times I’ve inserted new poems into the ms. or taken old ones out, or how often I’ve juggled the poems in a vain attempt to find the best possible arrangement or how the much smaller original manuscript was accepted by a publisher in England back in the 90s but who later informed me that he couldn’t do it owing to a lack of funds or that about ten years ago, I sent a longer version to a small-press publisher in the western US who rejected it after two years or that five years after that, I sent another even longer version to a small-press publisher on the east coast who also rejected it after two years—all of which leads me to what Joe Hutchison has to say about Bill Knott’s post re publishing one’s work: Do you DIY or keep sending it out in hopes that some publisher will mercifully DI4U—perhaps even before you die?