Just in time for National Poetry Month, my interview, The Habitual Poet: Sherry Chandler, is posted at the poemeleon blog.
The Habitual Poet is a generous feature of poemeleon, offered to all their contributors.
In this interview, I answer this question:
Q: Have you ever received any fan (or hate) mail? If so, what was that like?
A: No. Not even an e-mail. I tweet micropoetry as @BluegrassPoet and I get a lot of favoriting and retweets, but that’s a different sort of feedback.
In an exchange of comments on Facebook, Dave Bonta had this to say about my answer:
I would just like to point out that that’s because you choose to publish your work elsewhere instead of publishing it on your own blog — a very defensible choice, of course, but it does mean foregoing that organic connection with a readership (which I guess Twitter has given you some inkling of).
And actually, I lied — forgot — because I have had an e-mail in praise of a published poem. It was my publication in Umbrella. Not only was it a thrill but it got me a valued contact with a fellow poet.
So I would urge any and all of you who read here, when you find a poem you respond to, take time to contact the poet and let him or her know. We do it for the love you know, certainly not for the money.
I also got lots of encouraging feedback for my poem “Relics,” which was published in Dave’s own online magazine, qarrtsiluni. Dave and Beth were kind enough to nominate this poem for a Pushcart. It is a magazine in blog format and, just for that reason, response and feedback to the poets is very easy. I urge everybody to drop by there. Submit, too.
So here it is National Poetry Month and I could interpret Dave’s remarks as a challenge to break old habits. I am not in the habit of posting poems to this blog in part because of my work habits, which are slow and erratic. I also enjoy my habit of submitting my poems to the vetting of editors. “Acceptance” is a kind of validation I am in the habit of appreciating.
I also understand its downside, though, and so I am playing with the notion, since I have been somewhat challenged by Dave, of trying to post a poem a day to this blog. I do NOT consider that a firm commitment. I find NaPoMo an exhausting affair sometimes and I’m not sure I’ve got the stamina. We’ll see how it goes.
(After all, I haven’t even been keeping up with my micropoetry posts lately. I plead bronchitis. And then there are my erasure poems — I get to count those — and the tree year. And leave us not forget the NEW BOOK. May be I’m over committed.)
In years past, for National Poetry Month, I have been in the habit of featuring one Kentucky poet a day. That is not a bad habit and I may well reprise some of those poet posts.
