A few days ago as I uploaded pictures for the Santa Fe travelogue, I got a warning from Wix.com, my blog management site. I had only a few MB of storage left in the image storeroom, and I needed to buy more storage if I wanted to continue storing pictures. Of course, this was an absurd suggestion since I could simply delete the photos that I had saved in the image storage here at Wix with no charge to me whatsoever, and I have done so, and now have 493 MB of image storage. Hooray for a bit of critical thinking! And for being a tightwad!
However, as I scrolled back through all of the pictures, I was starkly reminded of why I started this blog in the first place--to connect with people who may be interested in reading my works. You, my friends, my family, my readers--hopefully, a few people I don't really even know. I write because it is what I do, but I always hope that my writing does something for you. If nothing else, I hope it inspires to write because you think, "I can do better than this." Yes, I am not egotistical. I only hope that I am artistic.
To be honest, I began this blog because the hybrid publisher (Avoid hybrid publishing like the plague!) of my last book of poetry Atheists and Empty Spaces had emailed me and basically said, "If you don't create an online presence, we will do it for you and charge you for the services if you would like." I did not like. It is possible to create an online presence without paying someone else to do it-- or at least that is what I thought. It is harder than it seems. Anybody out there willing to help me with TikTok and Instagram? Apparently, blogging and Facebook are not the way to get "out there." Who knew?
To make a long story short, by my own actions, I have been reminded that my main purpose for this blog has gone by the wayside, and I must get back to the basics. For some newcomers and all of my longtime faithful blog readers, here are the four reasons that we are here.
This is my latest book. In it, I mimic the writing styles of my favorite poets. Most of the poems are written in traditional forms, but not all are. The main theme of the poems is that we have all become atheists in a manner because we have lost touch with the sublime in our lives. We do not connect with all of the awe-inspiring things that surround us every minute of every day. Rather than enjoy the simple things in life, we--and I include everyone in this including myself--tend to fill the empty spaces in our lives with things that cause more problems than help bring us happiness. I do not offer solutions in the book to the issues of our collective atheism or our inept attempts to fill the emptiness in our minds and souls. I simply point out the problems in various ways.
The Joy of Shadows, written with my alter ego William Joy Bragi, is a continuation of a complicated set of poems arguing against the contemporary view of poetry using the style of some of the most puzzling, but popular, poets of the last fifty years. ( I say "popular," yet hardly anyone outside of academia has ever heard of these poets such as John Ashbery." The first set of complicated poems is published in the book below.
This book is published solely under the name of my alter ego. Why? Well, I assumed that a few people might read this book and that the attacks on contemporary poets and their poetry would not be taken lightly or kindly. I did not want people's anger to be focused on me and mine. I did not care about my alter ego. He is not real, and I even tried, unsuccessfully, to get rid of him after The Joy of Shadows. He is still not real and is mostly gone, but he does still show up occasionally, not as much as Dewey Lynne Bugler does, but every once in a while his thoughts pop up in my writings.
I admit that these two books, The Mercy Killing and The Joy of Shadows are really for the hardcore poet and poetry critic. Hell, I don't even remember every thing I was criticizing in these books anymore. However, there are some beautiful personal moments like a tribute to my Grandma Gerlach's sister, Aunt Helen, on page 29 of The Mercy Killing and the extremely poignant The Solitary One, which I have tried to rewrite a hundred times, on page 76 of The Joy of Shadows.
Finally, we have the embarrassingly crude and immature poetry of mine that I collected in 1998. Some of the poems in this book were written when I was fifteen or so. I had a spiral notebook with a cosmic van on the front of it that I carried around for years. I don't know what happened to it. It probably fell apart as I turned the pages typing the poems and songs and saving them onto an old floppy disk. Somewhere, somebody has copies of poems that I wrote before 1982. If you have them, you know who you are!
While I was not a very good technical poet in 1998, I had some great ideas. This book is full of very personal stuff. If you have the book, I would like to call your attention to My Friend's Funeral After His Suicide on page 281. I don't recall ever having such a hard time writing a poem that just flowed out of my mind. The words came easily, but they were hard to type. By the way, the song written by Glen Hicklin was actually folded up in the notebook that I mentioned above.
All four of my books are readily available online at Amazon and B&N and probably other booksellers. I know that The Mercy Killing was removed from some online bookseller for a while until somebody bought a copy elsewhere. Then it was back. You are not likely to find any of my books in bookstores. They do not sell enough to take up shelf space. If you would like copies from me, I am posting my email here that I use for business (mbt1966@yahoo.com). I can always mail one to you. Please, help me get the word out about my poetry and my blog.
That is it. I am back to the basics for a while. Check out my next blog in which I plan to talk about some of the favorite blogs of you, my readers. And, later, I will be talking about the compilation of nature, some written at the request of you, my faithful readers.