POETICKS

I expect soon to put some stuff about me here.  I may make it a storage area for all the bios of myself I’ve made over the years.  To make a start, I’ll merely say that I’m an Aged Codger (closing in on 69 as I write this) who began a secondary (and unprolific) career as a Serious Poet at the age of eighteen mostly emulating Keats.  My first publication came in 1966 when I had a collection of visual haiku inspired by E. E. Cummings and the Peter Pauper series of Japanese haiku in English printed.  poemns. I actually sold forty or fifty copies.  It was over five years later that I got any poetry published again–conventional haiku by Dragonfly, a leading haiku magazine at the time, and Bonsai, a more advanced haiku magazine just starting out that only lasted two or three issues.  No other publications until I was around forty and began getting visual poems and critical essays published–both first in Score, as I recall.  My first important vispo contact was Karl Kempton, but I soon was corresponding with numerous others, in particular, Crag Hill of Score. I met a number of these people at one of mIEKAL aND’s Swampfests, mIEKAL then as now being a Key Illuminary in Our Field.

By this time, I had begun The Runaway Spoon Press, publishing just about all kinds of poetry but specializing in visual poetry.  1987.  22 years later the press close to comatose, and has been for probably ten years or more.

I was close to fifty when John Martone published my first little collection of mathemaku although I’d composed two mathematical poems twenty or so years before that.

My career as an extremely uncertified theoretical psychologist began the year after poemns when–inspired by an article in the New York Times Magazine, of all things, I sketched out what I considered a complete psychology.  I’ve since adding a great deal to it, but only two or three central Main Ideas to the four to six I started with.  I’ve published excerpts of my theory on the Internet, and published three or four chapters of it in the two editions of Shakespeare and the Rigidniks I self-published a few years ago.  Just about no one has taken it seriously.

At various stages of my life, I concentrated on plays–very conventional ones, except for the ideas expressed by some of their characters.  I now have ten or so full-length plays done and a handful of one-acts.  I only consider four or five finished, though.  I think I would most like to have succeeded as a playwright.  Indeed, I pushed my poetry more to get a name I thought I could use to get people interested in my plays than anything else.  No such luck.

I have ideas for a bunch of books, and a 200,000-word sci-fi novel that’s half final draft, half final-revision-in-progress.  Discouragement over the way my writing career has gone, and over the uselessness of publishing this has prevented me from going on with the revision.

I should say that I’ve lived all my life under the “poverty line” and am now a Welfare Recipient in serious credit card debt but owning a fully-paid-for albeit decrepit house in Port Charlotte, Florida, a little south of Sarasota and north of Fort Myers on the west coast.

I have a cat named Shirley.

There.  Much more aboutness than I thought I’d write.

(Gad, according to my spell-checker, I did the above errorlessly!  Something is seriously wrong.)