Assessing my accumulation of poems, thinking most of them bad, wondering why most of the good ones among them haven't been published, I think I hit on why:

The poems are about the past!

Yes, indeed! From Captain Kangaroo to grape soda, to partying in the '80s, to way-back school days when they gave wiggly-block IQ tests, to the thirty-year-old spools in my sewing box (a what box!?!?!), to the Thresher submarine disaster in 1963 -- they're about the past! Yes, Galway Kinnell got away with writing a book titled The Past. It's been done.

Literary editors tend to be younger these days. We know for sure their screeners are very young. Remember how we used to glaze over when the old folks told us about Fibber McGee and Molly, etc.? How wonderful for us to remember the Sinclair dinosaur or the Gemini space program! And how incomprehensible and irrelevant to the young!

I've been writing poems that are like memoirs! A poem ain't a memoir!

I know "you write what you have to write," but I hope to consciously write more about the present and future. Thank you to Adrienne Rich, whom I now see kept her poetic focus on the present and future -- risky, in the way writing about the past is not.

The work of Adrienne Rich, her prose and poetry, led me to books by Andrea Dworkin, Judy Grahn, H.D., Louise Bogan, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Eleanor Ross Taylor and many more: Good and great poets who didn't catch on, are shunned in institutions, because these poets' work is "tainted" by anger, or by politics critical of the system, by what they had to say. The present world prefers the shimmering, the ineffable, the duende, the amusing. Poems we write hoping they are tickets into the system. Poems that are the literary equivalent of boned, skinned chicken breasts. Maybe she left a key somewhere as to where  poetry can go next.

I and my friends at one time read Rich's works like scripture, but tired of Rich's politics when they weren't just about women anymore. I tried to read later books of her poems, but after Time's Power, they embarrassed me. Their politics were hemispheric and inclusive. Even she didn't sound convinced of them. But still to this day I read her prose with admiration. She was a poet who was also a thinker. When it was first published, there was nothing like he book Of Woman Born. There was no essay like "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence."

She's gone. There's nobody I can think of who can take her place. What will happen? Here's a quotation posted by playwright Joan Lipkin on Facebook. Worth re-reading:

"Whatever is unnamed, un-depicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language–this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable."- Adrienne Rich

An earlier form of the "Ten Reasons Not to Sleep with a Poet" screed was circulating even before the Internet, but the amusing hepcat literary site TheRumpus.net, maybe thinking it new, has it online, and among all the responses that said "Here's the 11th reason not to do it" "the 12th reason" was this beautiful rejoinder by "Grey," whose real name is This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., and who gave me permission to post it here. Not for everyone, it's an antidote to cynicism and a hymn to the way poets can love.

Ten Reasons TO Sleep with a Poet

1. If they were raised without religion, their use of imagery and metaphor will be straightforward; they will call you simple, endearing names like, “honey” and “dear.” If they were raised in some fundamentalist religion, you will sense the pain and anguish in the depth of their eyes and experience the back and forth of the dogmatic right/wrong hold from which their heart is still trying to get out from underneath; you will excuse this because of the ways in which they often make you feel holy.
2. They will sigh softly in their sleep when they wake up intermittently and realize that you are lying next to them and express this satisfaction and elation through whispers that slightly resemble their waking voices. This sound will echo in your ears as you are moving through your day.
3. In bed, they will say things like, I want you to fuck me with your huge cock, which said by anyone else might seem crass and disgusting, but it does nothing but turn you on more and you are even sure that this might be a line from a more radical poem on the politics of queer sex that they have written.
4. They will listen deeply to everything that you say, and at the beginning you might wonder if they are really listening, and then two weeks later they recite the exact thing you said and this is both a little embarrassing (did I really say that?) and wonderful at the same time.
5. They help you believe that you, too, are really a poet. They sometimes (obnoxiously) rephrase observations that you make about simple, mundane things to point out the beauty so much so that when you are alone and notice something simple, you can imagine what they might say about the way the jade plant in your living room leans slightly forward to take in all of the sun that it can.
6. They imprint your life with small details that drive you crazy and that you never realized you had room for before, like the way they describe the line from your hipbone to your chest, which they describe over and over again as “open.” They notice how you slouch in your chair when you are angry and tuck your thumbs into your fists when you are feeling anxious.
7. They will laugh with a sense of joy that feels pure. They tear up at sunsets. They have loved deeply, over and over again.
8. Their preferred form of communication is (clearly) the written word, and they will send you emails and texts with lines from their favorite books of poetry. They leave you notes in the morning written on napkins, wrappers, and bits of paper you had lying around.
9. Sleeping with a poet will set a new precedence in the act of gift-giving and celebrating holidays (especially birthdays) from there on out. They will give you gifts they have made themselves or buy you something you never directly asked for but happened to mention one day, like when you told the story about longing to play catch with your older brother growing up and then they bought you your own glove for Christmas. Or they will write bits of Rumi on the pots of houseplants they give you and say things in cards, like: “You were in my dream last night. I don’t remember the whole of it, but you kissed me. The potency of the sensation was incredible—even in a dream. And when I woke up, I still felt the kiss in my body.” 
10. Nothing will ever be just what it is. Getting brunch will be a reason to write a joint poem on a napkin together, each of you authoring alternating lines. Reading to one another from your favorite books will take the place of meals because you will forget that you are hungry, a walk in the spring will be full of wind and smells and colors and tastes and textures that you never imagined before, especially not before you slept with a poet.

The Feb. 28 "Giving Voice" poetry concert, "a chapbook you could hear," was well attended (beyond my hopes) and begot lots of ideas: "You should do this every year," someone suggested. But, better, I suggested to some poets that they set poems in their chapbooks or books for choral reading, and that would be a great way to promote the poetry and therefore their books. All they need to do is to create an arrangement, set a date, get a venue and then some good people game to read. Gratifying.

Then on Thursday I get called by an MTV producer in New York. They are filming a "The Real World" episode about a young first-time self-published St. Louis author, Joel Ehrlichman, marketing his book with his ex-girlfriend's help. They'd heard I was an editor. Would I read his book, Gateway, and give my opinion on camera? Legal tangles quashed filming at Wash U, so the author and crew ended up at my house Sunday with their lights and two cameras: one focused on the author and his girlfriend and one on me. As a first book it's a good effort, but it's the common drugs-and-degradation story that young people feel compelled to tell. All young writers write these things, but back in my day we didn't have the technology to publish them (thank you, God). Now and then a drug novel like Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero, or Jim Carroll's Basketball Diaries makes a hit. But I think the drug novel market is saturated and his good effort is going to have a hard time. Told him I was eager to read his second book. The MTV Segment airs in April, I was told. Gratified again.

Wake up this morning with to email message from Cerise Press (I'd heard of them) saying my book Meet Me made their list of Editors' Favorites. Gratified again. But wait, there's more....an interview with me published on David Alan Lucas's blog, "Coffee with David." It was an honor to be asked.

Have I now reached the "survivor stage," like, say W.S. Merwin or May Sarton, where I matter just because I'm still alive?