Self-Publish or Perish

Geof Huth, "BIRD" (2011)
I was walking today.

I haven't been walking much recently. The bitter cold discourages me even though I feel the cold less sharply than most do. But I walk. And today I was walking.

As I'm apt to do, I was thinking, but in a wandering, directionless way.  Somehow, I thought about poetry publishing, maybe because I'd read an announcement today about a book of poetry to be published, a book that won a contest (out of a set of about 450 books) to be published.

I'm not one to enter contests of any kind, and I've entered book publishing contests only four times, twice because I was young, twice because I was invited to. No book of mine was published from these efforts.

What the announcement of one-in-450 to publish a book tells me is that poetry publishing is hard to come by, if you care about status, if you see poetry as a career.

I don't. Never have. Poetry is an urge.

Earlier in life, back in the 1980s and a little into the 1990s, I used to submit work to magazines all the time. Doing so took enormous effort, and constant, but I had credits to my name. To some degree, I had people who knew who I was because of that. (I knew this best when someone parodied my work. I didn't mind being parodied. I loved it.)

In the last six years, I've almost never submitted poetry anywhere, because I hate the process, I hate the time wasted. I'd rather write. So I have. I've written many books, actually. At least first drafts. I've begun a large writing project that will sometime be a set of about twenty books.

So my idea is to begin publishing them, under my own imprint--dbqp--a press that's been dormant for years. Since I always want to design my own books, I might as well take over the publishing of them as well.

It's an idea, at least. Somehow publishing can be an act of writing, an act of art, an act worth my time.

Maybe I'll even do it.

Poetry is an urge

ecr. l'inf.