Getting my website at johnfbrowning.com up and going with assist from my son, Mike. I'm thinking maybe this is the way to publish my crazy poetry, more than get published actually or keep on self-publishing.  Maybe some of all three?  Anyway, its a way to punch my micropoetry and my other poetry and push it out to social media.

I'm also going old school and getting bookmarks made at vistaprint. I wanted a muse on there, but they put an image of what looks like a teenaged girl in a tshirt on there. I had to reject that - makes me look like a child molester or something.  I want somthing more age-appropriate for an old beat up poet.  Maybe a pre-Raphaelite muse.

Today, I found out that I can push the blue microphone button on my Xfinity controller, say "Blue Oyster Cult" and select Blue Oyster Cult videos on 'shuffle'.  These videos, a mixture of live footage and MTV and pre-MTV style videos then play for an hour or so.  Is this not a wonderful thing?  Particularly wonderful are: "Joan Crawford (has risen from the grave)", "Godzilla", "Born to be Wild" and "Astronomy". 

Blue Oyster Cult was (is?) a band of suburban Long Island Jewish fellows, a former Bar Mitzvah band, who play ominous sounding, metallic rock undercut by humor, mainly wry but sometimes harsh. Their lead guitarist (really good) called himself "Buck Dharma" but looks like your cousin Jerry who was in the science club.  What a great band!

I am mentally preparing for my MFA studies, hatching strategy in my mind.

10/07/17

best of times for me

Reading Andrew Marvell at Rutgers with Ann Baynes Coiro and workshopping in Advanced Poetry with Evie Shockley.  Along with my weekly workshopping with the US1 Poetry Collective in Princeton, I am in Maximum Poetry Overdrive.  These two professors seem almost too good to be true.  But they are true.

With poetry, there is always the DRIFT. By that, I mean that I start to wonder if I am starting to lose my mind a little bit.  I think most artists and poets get this sensation: that one has drifted just a little too bit far from shore.

Fortunately, my babysitting duties (not the right word, more like babysitting heaven) with my granddaughter Allison Jade Browning, keeps me tethered planetarily. Hanging out with a 16 month old brings the Earthly dimension to everything.  Keep it simple.

Allison, along with the three dogs and their needs and the two parakeets keep things very grounded. I also try to cook several times a week, take cookies to US1 Workshop and watch Larry David on TV. All of these things keep it real.

The poetry deal is funny. Funny. I submit poems and they all get summarily rejected.  So, you get that dichotomy:  write to be published vs. write to write what it is you want to say.  I am definitely erring on the side of saying what I want to say.  It's hard to even consider what might get published.  In workshop, I get some advice like, "Help your reader out a little more."  I am loathe to do this. I want my reader to follow me in my own poem, not the opposite.

There is the constant tug, when I am with others, of the commercial with respect to poetry. However, there is really NO COMMERCE in poetry.  Earnings-wise, like most art, it is a loser.  So why worry?  I try not to.