A list from my diary of my main micro-triumphs for the 1991:
(1) 4 different presses (all “micro-presses”) solicited me for material to make books of and I sent stuff they found acceptable to all four. One is to be a book of just four poems, the second a book of seven poems, and the third a book of perhaps a dozen poems. The fourth (Haw!) is (probably–the main editor accepted it but it still needs the okay of some panel under him) to be a printing of Barbaric Bart Meets Batperson and her Indian Companion, Taco. Sent Werebird to Sarasota, too. (It was turned done, needless to say. The play was accepted, then printed with the pages out of order.)
(2) Factsheet Five, the only magazine I’ve been doing a regular column for changed hands, and the new editor kept only two of the old columnists, out of ten or so: me and another guy. A minor triumph, for sure, but reassuring (until somebody else took over and dropped me).
(3) I’ve been sent forms to fill out by two Who’s Who publishers, one the standard people here in the US, the other some people in England who do an International Who’s Who. The U.S. Who’s Who is called Who’s Who in the South and Southwest and seems to be the Who’s Who one level below that company’s Who’s Who in America. I got pegged for the international one through a friend who’s gotten into it; I have no idea where the other company got my name. I’m only being considered for both but, still, any kind of recognition is encouraging. (I got into both.)
(4) Just yesterday I got a letter from a new acquaintance who wants to do an article on me for a magazine he writes for. If it comes off, and I’m sure it will, it will be the first article on me.
(5) I had some pieces in an international visual poetry show in San Luis Obispo that then went on tour. One of its stops was in New York State, where my brother Bill went to see it, reporting that due to lack of space only ten of the seventy or so artists in the show had work displayed–and I was one of them! I also had things in shows elsewhere in the U.S., and in Italy, Ireland and Australia.
(6) Two of my visual poems were reprinted in a German anthology of American visual poetry.
(7) A slick magazine called Art Papers had a survey of mail art in which I was mentioned.
(8) A quarterly poetry magazine is publishing excerpts from my Of Manywhere-at-Once–and describing me as “a nationally-known poet, critic and publisher.”
(9) A poem I co-authored is to be translated into a foreign language (Italian). (Ha, I had forgotten about that. Iti did get translated, so I’ve now been translated into at least two foreign languages, Italian and Hungarian. I’m pretty sure something of mine was translated into German, too–probably the words of a visual poem in one of the German publications I had work in.
10. 52 copies of Of Manywhere-at-Once, 2nd ed., got into print. The printer did an excellent job as far as I could tell. Of course, I found defects, but they were my fault, not the printer’s. I was quite satisfied with the book, overall.
Pretty weak. The horror of it is that I’ve done little better since.