On Friday, 22 June 1990, I drove to Fort Myers in a rental car to pick up a hundred or so copies of Of Manywhere-at-Once, my very first full-length book. I’d xeroxed its pages using a Xerox I’d been able to buy using an inheritance from my step-grandmother, and taken the pages to Fort Myers to a printer than perfect-bound them. I thought the book looked pretty good.
Over the weekend that followed, I packed 22 copies, mailing them out to literary friends and family members on Monday. The next day I attended a meeting of the Port Charlotte Tuesday Writers’ Group.
My writers’ club meeting went fairly well: Lee Hoffman (a prize-winning writer of westerns and my closest friend in Port Charlotte, and possibly the best friend I ever had anywhere) brought me a bunch of software, and I talked a while about my book and ended selling two copies of it, one to Nell (an extremely nice older lady who’d had a couple of books published), and one to a lady who was at another meeting of ours long ago and showed up for no particular reason today. She said she felt stumped by modern poetry despite having recently had a college class in it. I told her my book might help her with it. I’ll be interested to find out how she finds the book, and whether it helps her.
Thinking about that when I later covered the day in my diary, I realized that I put no transitions from traditional poetry into the various new kinds of poetry my book was about. I described the various kinds of poetries but was not too good about showing where they are alike, and why someone who likes one kind ought to like the best examples of the other kinds as well. Of course, I indirectly did all that by discussing the different kinds of poems similarly, and finding similar good things in them. And what I then called the eulocational, dislocational (mainly jump-cut) et al discussion was fairly direct.