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If anyone reading this has followed my posts on respectively my poetry blog and my art blog,

they may have noticed a decrease in the former and an increase in the latter.

I currently devote almost no time to poetry, and the meager creative energies I still have, sapped as they are with age, are spent on my sputtering artwork . . .

As I've pointed out many times on this blog and perhaps elsewhere, it has become more and more clear to me that my poetry is and has for the most part always been a failure—

I wish it were otherwise. I wish my poems were in the anthologies, but they aren't. Go look at the walls of Contemporary American Poetry anthologies—there have been hundreds of them published during the 40 or so years of my active career as a poet, and while I was fortunate to appear in a few anthols in the late 1960s/early 1970s, as time has passed my time has passed—you won't find my work in hardly any of the thousand relevant anthologies.

Maybe "thousand" is hyberbole. But hundreds isn't. It would be interesting to see a complete bibliography of anthologies published in the past half-century which include poetry by contemporaneous USA poets.

In any case, I don't think I will write any more poems. The law of diminishing returns, old age, the loss of any valid hope, the failures that pile up and crush the soul— I can't go on trying to write poetry which no one wants, which no one (with the exception of a few scattered delusionals) respects.

And as for my "artworks", their success rate is bound to be even less than that of my verse. But since I'm not trying to sell them, because I give them away free, their acceptance/rejection will hopefully never become the inhibiting and hurtful issue it was for me in poetry.

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