The other day, for the first time in about four years, someone—Kelsey, to be precise—interacted with a post I'd made advertising Screefing: A Tree Planter's Reflection for US$1 as a promotion for the pending release of A Few Words on the Way: Haiku and Short Poems, a collection that I subsequently got distracted from and never did release. The interaction got me thinking that maybe I should resurrect that intention after letting it go for reasons ranging from your garden variety ADD chaos through to self-consciousness, chronic depression, and a nervous breakdown, and including, if I am being uncompromisingly honest, a deep sense of personal failure when I measure my own achievements against those of friends and colleagues who have attained more measurable success creatively and academically, and whose achievements I admire and respect. I've been afraid, I suppose, of looking like a pretender or a poser and thus making myself appear pathetic. And honestly, I think this may be a common affliction among many so-called “part-time” academic faculty. But the truth is, while I no longer have even the vaguest aspiration toward worldly success—and have always had a dubious view of that notion anyway, which probably partially explains my not having attained it—I do believe I have something worthwhile to offer, and recognize as well that my capacity with words is not exactly minuscule, and that my reading and thinking are sufficiently broad and deep to put forward without embarrassment.
But if you disagree, don't blame me: blame Kelsey.
Of course, since the last time I logged into the site I'd been using as a writer's homepage, the entire system has changed, and I no longer have access to my controls to that material, so I have to set up a new page before doing anything else. Honestly, though, a clean start may not be a bad idea: certainly better than a visible four-year gap. And in any case, I am no longer the person I was. This was true even before the pandemic hit, in my case with a deep sense of relief as it made a communal necessity of the self-isolation I very much needed and let me retreat into a private world where I could clarify and unify the fragments of my thinking and being: a work still very much in progress, some of it publicly of late in the event that someone else might find it useful. But the world is about to open up again. And I think I might want to be a part of it. The part that I want to be involves both words and images. Here are a few or the words. You know where to find the images as I share them freely.
Regarding price, it will be US$3. While there are no production costs involved and part of me wants to just give it away for free as it makes me happy to share things, there are compelling reasons to charge a fee. Art is work, and work is worth something. Not just the product itself, but the many years it takes to become able to produce it, are worth something. Life and its endeavors are worth something. And if artists don't demand that their worth be acknowledged, no one will acknowledge it for free. In this case the collection contains roughly 300 short poems, which translates into about a penny a poem. Canada does not even mint pennies anymore as they cost more than they are worth, so you will rarely find a more generous artistic offer than this one, which I hope to have available no later than early July.
But if
you don't like what you find here, seriously, don't blame me: blame Kelsey.
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