Hello, subscribers to “And Now, A Sonnet”. It’s been a minute.
This is a short note to say I’ll be opening the sonnet series in the next couple of weeks. I closed the series over a year ago to focus on a manuscript and return to print publishing. What I learned from that experience is a bit too long to post on this note : I will likely address it in a longer exposition to come.
I have a love-hate for the blog form, because I mistrust the ease in which content can be published. My preference is for oversight and curation. The approval of an editing board indicates the strength and appeal of the poem. This kind of curation should come with a kind of patronage : that editors would cultivate their poets. To some degree they do—the professional poets that work in the university system. I am not of that class, so I must curate my own content.
However, the ease in which I could write anything, and post it to a blog, is unnerving. At times it is irritating. I’d rather not like to throw so much out to see what sticks. So I will continue my one-sonent-a-week form. This, despite it being only 14 lines, is an exhausting schedule. Each week will take seven to ten hours to write and revise a poem, which is ( to me ) never enough time, but it will be mine. As I consider new manuscripts I realize I don’t have the time for it. The blog form keeps me writing.
In referring to the time I don’t have, I’d like my readers to consider a paid subscription. Compensation for those ten hours a week on a poem would go far toward helping me pay for self-publishing costs: a website, printing costs, subscriptions for publishing tools. The recompense to paid subscribers of any tier will be a physical books and chapbooks of these poems.
More on all that later. For now, I’ll return to my work, and expect to see this blog again in a few Mondays from now.
All the best!
Welcome back to the monkey house, James!