"Are You Published Yet?"

Pretty much the only thing anyone wants to know about your poetry once you've informed him you are indeed a poet is:

"Are you published yet?"

To be published you must submit to publishers, and very likely quite a few times. But I found myself often in the midst of a spurt of creativity, the in-between times spent putting my verse up at my own website (this being the modern-day "publishing"). I didn't want to de-rail either effort with the more left-brain effort of submitting.

This I would explain to people tirelessly in response to the inevitable first question outlined above. I would also mention that my poetry had been published here-and-there on the internet (see "Press" below), that I had printed a chapbook with some of my poems, and that I had been published in other genres throughout my life. This included a major city newspaper as a student contributor, college newspaper, features editor of a college newspaper, a couple of free-lance articles, and governmental publications.

One elderly lady, even after hearing these responses to her persistent question, still didn't hear (or get) it. So, on one recent Sunday she proclaimed quite nastily (in my then view) in front of a couple friends of mine that I was an unpublished poet and songwriter, or something to that effect.

After going through all the "deconstruction" of her statement, I came around to seeing it as a nudge from God, or perhaps Madame Destiny, that I could do better in that regard. Time to move from creation and website design to actual submission in an organized fashion.

I made something on the order of 30-40 submissions in rapid order, thanks to her "nastiness".

One opportunity I came across almost immediately were a couple of ladies looking for poems about or written in a laundromat. Because I had spent so much time allowing myself to have my creative spurts, and to post the produce at my site, I had the perfect poem:

"Down at the Laundromat"

Not only could I provide the text of the poem, but also a link to show how it looks at my site, not to mention a link to my bio.

Blam! They agreed to publish it. Thank you Wilda Morris and Cathy Conger who are putting together "a paperback anthology" of short stories, humorous essays, and poetry.

Perhaps I was right about the order of things.

NOTE: The anthology referred to in this little anecdote never materialized as far as the poet knows.