In Dallas visiting family. Just was in touch with someone with some hopeful news about a potential future publishing connection. Fingers crossed, but I need to really work hard on the manuscript for a while, maybe a couple of months. Will get some poems ready to send out soon. Am thinking about tense in poems and how conservatively people like a poem to be in one tense. I am having a battle with this in how some poems move towards reflection from the past to the present and reverse in their thinking, so I'm going to have to communicate this to an editor who likes things to be in one tense. I'm not so sure they need to be.

I've been at times getting down about the reception of SEVEN, which I think is a strong book. Maybe the fear is all in my head, but I'm just not sure about the poetry scene, and I express this in a recent interview. All I can do is try to be genuine and work hard with my own writing, and let go the b.s. that surrounds us all. It's kind of crazy sometimes how bad work is promoted over strong work, but se la ve. The important thing is that we live fully and vibrantly, and that is outside of the po-biz and even the writing.

Also want to send a couple more stories out to journals. Writing is much more fun than sending out new work. There's so much to contend with these days.

This one guy, Seth Abramson is his name I believe, wrote a long, long, long article at the Huffington Post which seemed to knock just about everyone down including avant-garde poets, confessional poets and so forth. Here's the link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-abramson/on-literary-metamodernism_b_3629021.html I don't want to be part of the new thing? The article felt like Marjorie Perloff all over again. It seems that we shouldn't have to put one another down to get good work done. Sometimes I think the new thing is the old thing with new rags. But there's the expectation that one be innovative, yet even when one is doing something new, people don't see it because it's all sensationalism and know-it-all ism. It seems at times people are putting on an act or several acts. All we can do is write and write and write and try to be genuine. Speaking/Meaning/Saying and this broken identity searching for wholeness-- isn't that what poetry has always been about?

Well, I'm feeling at the bottom of the barrel these days with the poetry, but I'm hopeful that it's all in my head, but it sure looms dark today. Fact is, I work hard, and I sense I'm underestimated and well, largely invisible. The preoccupation with such things has deep roots, and what truly matters is arriving at pleasure and growth from writing. Everyone probably feels this way.