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I used to only write poems like this one.  Now, I hardly ever write poems of this ilk: allusive, abstract, difficult, whimsical.  You know, New York School, y'all.  They were my teachers, after all. Is this regression?  I thought I'd leave it to a vote.  Let me know if you approve or disapprove.  Yea or nay. If the response if positive, I will not crawl about the room in despair.  If negative, meh.

Machines Made of Meat

                                    The origin of everything is nothing.

In some versions of reality,

You are reading this poem.

In others, you are still in bed.

One is led, therefore, into difficulties,

Except, of course, for Li Po.

That wily bastard is riding a surfboard,

Dangling on the lip of a wave,

Just as his cigarette dangles from his lip,

While he points at an empty space

In the cloudless sky as he sidles by,

Where the moon would want to be,

If it happened to be following along.

Everything is liable to decay.

If someone, traditionally called the observer,

Happened to be following along,

That person would be engaged

In a shameless act of poetry:

Did your friend, Chang, dream

That he was a butterfly, or did

The butterfly dream that it was he?

Nobody knows what’s behind door number three.

Keith Dunlap

You Don't know What You Don't Know

I feel as though writing poetry has been shanghai'd by people who can't write having their revenge against those who can, much in the same way politics has been taken over by people who can't think, having their revenge against people who can. (I don't really think that, but it makes a good polemic for what follows.) I think writing is intuitive, but it comes with a lot of practice and hopefully a good editor.  I know I have written a lot of bad stuff and continue to write a lot of bad stuff, but I've done it so much that I can tell when I've hit my standard at least, so that I am prepared to turn it over to someone else's set of critical eye, because, and this last point is essential, there will always be things I cannot see, good and bad.  The worst attribute for a writer is a kind of American Idol defensive righteousness about one's one work.  One needs a thick skin, of course, and some detachment from the success or failure show, but there is nothing sadder and more obnoxious than the neophyte convinced of his own posterity.  (I should know, having been that guy.)  Nothing is harder and more uncertain than good writing.

Simultaneous Submissions

I am now mostly submitting to magazines that do not accept simultaneous submissions.  Why? Not why am I submitting to these magazines (they are generally higher echelon magazines,) but why don't they accept simultaneous submissions?  I mean, really.  What's the big deal?  It is okay for writers to experience constant rejection, but not magazines?  In other words, are these magazine's egos so precious that if they accept a poem, and then learn that the writer had neglected to tell them that the same poem had been accepted somewhere else a month earlier, it is an affront that can't be countenanced?  I actually accidentally submitted simultaneously to a magazine that does not take simultaneous submissions and the magazine sent me a scathing letter barring me for life from submitting to it (because of an honest mistake).  Really?  I still laugh about that to myself once in a while.  Perhaps magazines do it to simply limit the number of submissions they receive.  Really?  Does it work?  It seems self-defeating: why would you want to limit the number of submissions you receive?  Having edited two magazines myself, it seems quite easy to eliminate (for whatever arbitrary editorial reason you espouse) about 95% of the submissions one receives on a quick read; sometimes just the first line tells you everything you need to know (sorry, the very human mind at work).  But, if, for whatever reason, (and I suspect the only real reason is because the big magazines can do it,) a magazine does not take simultaneous submissions, I think a necessary concurrent policy is that the turn around time should not exceed four weeks, six weeks at the most.  Otherwise, you put writers in the extremely difficult position of not getting poems published until years after a poem is written, if at all.  If "magazine a" takes six months to a year to respond to a submission, and then so do "magazine b" and "magazine c", etc., by the time "magazine g" sees the poem, the poet will have evolved, the world of poetry will have evolved, and a very good poem may have become stale, either in the eyes of the poet or the world.  Any policy other than accepting simultaneous submissions or not accepting them but promising a very rapid turnaround is only inconsiderate and insecure.  It is certainly not writer friendly.