I've been adding curricula over at the Dove St. School - intros/ruminations on various books. Have covered most of them now : Lanthanum next, soon.
Tell your friends! Another America in miniature.
3.27.2013
3.12.2013
Freelance librarian-hobo
I am going to be a freelance writer, by gum. Here are downloads of some of my poetry books for sale (pdf. format).
Am pondering a new blog, where I would present myself as a kind of free literary operator, in the wandering bard or peripatetic scholar mode, charging a nominal fee for my writings.
Of course I have some qualms about this : it goes against the grain of so much in both poetry & general internet culture ("everything is free!"). My whole orientation toward poetry has been to keep myself and my work at arm's length from any motivations which are not purely creative, artistic, detached, and free.
It's complicated. I composed my first poem in 1959, when I was 4 years old. My father immediately wrote it down on a little cardboard key card. My mother mailed the card to me, 50 years later. Over the ensuing decades of my writing life, I have been helped and befriended by so many kind, sweet, warm-hearted, generous people (starting with my parents), and fellow writers. On the other hand, the elite literary world of publication and acknowledgement has often amounted to many closed doors. Yet I'm something of a DIY fellow... I began long ago to craft my own doors of various kinds (this blog being one of them).
Moreover, I've worked at a 9-to-5 desk job now for almost 30 years, 12 months a year. As a writer, I don't get out much. My wild youth of musical hitchhiking and spiritual searching and bardic wandering is my somewhat repressed Other. This idea of freelancing (very abstract and Platonic for the moment) appeals to me... the Open Road calls to the ancient librarian....
So I may copy & paste this into my new small literary businessman/scholar blog, and see what happens. See you over there.
Am pondering a new blog, where I would present myself as a kind of free literary operator, in the wandering bard or peripatetic scholar mode, charging a nominal fee for my writings.
Of course I have some qualms about this : it goes against the grain of so much in both poetry & general internet culture ("everything is free!"). My whole orientation toward poetry has been to keep myself and my work at arm's length from any motivations which are not purely creative, artistic, detached, and free.
It's complicated. I composed my first poem in 1959, when I was 4 years old. My father immediately wrote it down on a little cardboard key card. My mother mailed the card to me, 50 years later. Over the ensuing decades of my writing life, I have been helped and befriended by so many kind, sweet, warm-hearted, generous people (starting with my parents), and fellow writers. On the other hand, the elite literary world of publication and acknowledgement has often amounted to many closed doors. Yet I'm something of a DIY fellow... I began long ago to craft my own doors of various kinds (this blog being one of them).
Moreover, I've worked at a 9-to-5 desk job now for almost 30 years, 12 months a year. As a writer, I don't get out much. My wild youth of musical hitchhiking and spiritual searching and bardic wandering is my somewhat repressed Other. This idea of freelancing (very abstract and Platonic for the moment) appeals to me... the Open Road calls to the ancient librarian....
So I may copy & paste this into my new small literary businessman/scholar blog, and see what happens. See you over there.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
