*
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 back 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 hyperbole. 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. I'd bet my verse would show up in less than one-tenth of one percent of them.
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 for official recognition, the repeated failures that pile up and crush one's ego—
I can't go on trying to write poetry which no one wants to publish (don't take my word for that, go look through the twenty pages posted here: http://knottpoetry.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2013-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=20,
and which no one (with the exception of a few isolated and insignificant marginalists) respects. (Again, don't take my word for that: go read the facts yourself: http://knottprosepo.blogspot.com/2012/03/critany.html
)
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 back 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 hyperbole. 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. I'd bet my verse would show up in less than one-tenth of one percent of them.
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 for official recognition, the repeated failures that pile up and crush one's ego—
I can't go on trying to write poetry which no one wants to publish (don't take my word for that, go look through the twenty pages posted here: http://knottpoetry.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2013-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=20,
and which no one (with the exception of a few isolated and insignificant marginalists) respects. (Again, don't take my word for that: go read the facts yourself: http://knottprosepo.blogspot.com/2012/03/critany.html
)
