Taking a Break

Summertime . . .

I’m going to get a little personal this morning, thanks.

I write in the mornings, before Jessica is up, before the children, even before the dog. It is a sacred part of my day where I focus on poetry, before the world takes over, and I have to be something other than a poet. When I began this series, it was because I was having trouble actually getting up to write. And what I was writing was written into a vacuum : no outlet, no submissions to journals, and no manuscript to speak of. I had, in the years prior to this series, lost the ability to think of my writing in terms of a collection. This series was a way to create output, to make sure I got to my writing desk and worked in the morning. It has been a very successful venture.

How has it been successful? This is an important question because I am, like many others I have met through this platform, looking to be successful here, yet we measure success differently. Some shun the word. Others need quantifiable data. We’re all interested in the number of subscribers. And many brave people are making this their living, so success or failure has material meaning.

My measure of success is how much I am actively engaged in the act of writing poetry. For the first year, I found tremendous success with this platform, because I delved into old habits and looked into old essays I hadn’t read before, searching for a kind of philosophy for my poetry, and finding it heavily inside the work of T.S. Eliot, John Berryman, and in the cannibal gardener myths “retold” by Joseph Campbell. I built a structure of meaning to poetry ( I still have not shared this ), that the poem is a rebirth from a first death and burial of experience. That we are in the act of resurrection, when we write poems.

This was glorious, and I found it productive, for the first couple years. One output was a crown of sonnets, which I’ve dubbed The Fourteen Thieves, and have on my desk beside me, waiting to be properly edited again into a chapbook. In fact, I have many poems printed out and ready to be worked on, because I now feel a turning back to the work I’ve written before, and choosing to submit work and push out a manuscript. This is a turn back again, and to better focus on that work, I mean to take a long summer break from this series.

So here’s what the schedule looks like:

June

There will be some pieces that will come out in June. I have a scheduled essay I am going to focus on first, for the Soaring Twenties Social Club, that will arrive to subscribers of that series on the 16th. I also have my annual James Joyce and Father’s Day poems that I don’t intend to miss ( and sure to lose subscribers to ). After that though, it’ll get a little empty up in here.

Remember that there are almost 80 sonnets archived on this site, so go ahead and peruse a few.

July and August

This work will be as dry as the Colorado. If anyone cares to write a sonnet or two as a guest post, I’m more than happy to include it and publish it here.

AN IMPORTANT NOTE FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS

Thank you for your support. I understand that I opened up paid subscriptions without any fanfare, mostly because some family friends offered up “pledges”. But then, some of you also began to pay for subscriptions, which is currently without any benefit from a free subscription.

To leave off three months, a quarter of a year, is as if I was taking for free a quarter of your yearly subscription payment, which I feel is ungenerous. Therefore, I intend to have a few posts that will be on the subject of the work I’m doing on these “off months”, mostly about the poetry I’m working on, and a few new poems to post here, just for you.

Otherwise . . .

See you in September!

I already have a poem scheduled September 11th, which will be when this publication returns to your inbox. In the meantime, if you need poetry, I have two publications to recommend:

Explore! I’ll let their work speak for themselves. These are my two favorite poets on Substack right now ( and there are many very good poets ).

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