Hello, everyone! Just a quick blog post to explain why my initial burst of poems has slowed to a trickle here at Poetry Soup.
You see, last week I went somewhere I haven't been for years. Someplace I didn't even think still existed. Yes, I traveled to:
A BARNES AND NOBLE BOOKSTORE!
Yes, they still exist - even though they're getting harder to find. This one was wayyy out in Calabasas, California, and took some work to get to. But as luck would have it, a parking space opened up right out front and I stepped inside.
Immediately I was assailed with sights, sounds and, yes, smells I hadn't encountered since ... well, since last year when I went to a B&N store in Phoenix, Arizona. (That was to get a gift card for my dad.)
It was amazing (or "amay-zing!!!" as the late, great Huell Howser would say). You see, I'm one of those people who took to the Amazon Kindle like a duck to water. Here at last was the Great Invention I'd been dreaming of my whole life: an entire library at my fingertips!
Yes, I did and do love all my "paper books". And I did and do love some (but not all) bookstores, and mourn some (but not all) which are no longer with us (such as Dutton's Books in North Hollywood, a bookstore whose shelves I often browse in my dreams).
But I am a firm believer in, and defender of, the ebook concept. And to those who complain that Amazon killed off the independent bookstores, may I just point out that the same was said of Borders and Barnes & Noble, when they first arrived on the scene? Bookstore-killing didn't begin with Amazon.
Anyway, so I was in the Calabasas B&N trying to find something to buy that I couldn't buy cheaper from Amazon, when I saw them -
Magazines!
Of course! As much as I enjoyed reading books on my Kindle, the whole e-magazine concept had never really appealed to me. I love having magazines to thumb through and cut pictures out of and use as coasters for my coffee mugs.
And B&N carries a nice healthy supply of magazines, lots of different topics and titles.
Including - poetry.
(I bet you thought I wasn't going to get to poetry for a while, right? Well, it IS a poetry blog. I know what I'm doing. Hang in there.)
So after perusing several volumes, I settled on one called "R" which stands for "Rattle". I liked it because (a) it's published right here in the San Fernando Valley (Studio City, to be exact) and (b) I actually found myself reading the poems and enjoying them. Some of the other poetry magazines were not really my style, and one of them did not seem to contain any poetry all, which seems rather odd for a magazine called "Poets and Writers"!
And after reading (and purchasing) "R"attle, I was moved to check out their website, and was delighted to find out that they BUY poems - $50 for the online edition and $100 for the print edition! And they actively encourage unpublished poets to submit their work!
I was all set to send them a couple of the poems I'd uploaded here at Poetry Soup when I read the fine print and ... yep, you guessed it ... they specifically stated that they only accepted previously unpublished poetry, and that putting my poems ANYWHERE online - whether on a blog, website or even Facebook - constituted being "published".
Sigh! Oh well ... after the initial disappointment wore off, I decided to take that as a motivation to write some new poems, which I then submitted. It may be a few months before I get a response, but that's okay. I can wait.
And if they don't sell, THEN I'll put them up here. Because as I'm sure you, as a poet yourself, will agree: published is published!
But a little $$ is nice too - especially if you plan to visit Barnes & Noble, which I may just do again - in a year or so!