Reintroduction: Three and a Half Years Hence

Reintroduction:  Three and a Half Years Hence

In late 2009, I launched this poetry blog as an experiment with medium, moving the most ancient form of literature from the written page to the digital universe.  More immediately, I began migrating some of my favorite works—from the vast stacks of composition books that I'd been amassing for decades—onto the Internet.  Still believing that I would finish my dissertation and that this would be a diversion from my academic studies, I set this sharing space in a virtual box to serve as a caged distraction. 

 

This launch did not occur in a vacuum. It quickly became both the emblem and account of the personal financial and emotional turmoil that I experienced alongside many of you during the Great Recession.  Economic realities set in with such unanticipated violence that my scholarly pursuits were put on hold then abandoned nearly contemporaneously.  The food for my mind—which I had wrapped up in an icon called PhD—took an immediate backseat to food for my family.  It did not take long for the disappointment to become habit and I accepted that I would never be Doctor. 

 

After launching the PoetEconomist site with bravado in October, 2009, I posted only three poems in all of 2010 until June of 2011.  I hovered over despair with such tenuous strength that those three un-scrapped poems were perhaps the only proof that I was alive during that time. 

 

When finally the light began peaking back through the darkness, in the flickering glow of this GUI, I realized that my diversion had become obsession:  my persona as PoetEconomist had become more than an alter-ego.   Avatar and reality merged.  Rather than recycle and publish work from my youth, I knew that it was from the ash heap of the present that I would once again serve a purpose:  capture, claim, chronicle. 

 

In its density, the poetry that has asserted itself over the past three and a half years has exploded in ways that I never imagined.  Originally meant to satisfy the requests of a few close friends who—however polite their requests may have originally been—insisted that I grow my corpus, this space embodies sustainability. 

 

I am fully aware that people don't read poetry on the subway or the beach in 2013.  I am fully aware that poetry can make hearts and brains ache.  I am fully aware that poetry, while concerned with a certain heady aesthetic, can easily bang up against the most otherwise permeable crania.  This is all especially true when it is largely self-absorbed and didactic.

 

As I have now shed the shroud from the oppressive darkness of the late aughts—stable in my finances, relationships, and responsibilities—with my first book of short stories, Momentitiousness, slated for publication later this year, I stand in awe of what this space has become.  A sharing space that has never been publicized anywhere but among close friends on Facebook—and the complicit, whispered word-of-mouth—has garnered nearly 5000 views from countries including but not limited to America, Russia, Germany, Japan, Ukraine, UK, Poland, Philippines, Romania, Indonesia, South Africa, Iraq, and China.  While this may seem petite frite compared to dancing cats or wizardly vampires, this seems—in poetry terms—the equivalent of a billion.

 

I continue this endeavor-come-responsibility with gratitude to my friends and their friends and their friends and to the world and to the universe for the support that has reinvigorated me and hopefully supported an enlightening, meaningful and enduring donation to the ether.  As I continue molting into my skin as PoetEconomist and author, know that this work is as much out of love as it is duty.  It is meant as much for you as it is me.