I got email from a small press publisher on another subject, answered it, and told him I had a book of poems from The Daily Bulletin that was 382 8½ x 11" single-spaced pages, in manuscript, formatted like Ron Androla's Poet Head: Selected Poems, 2001-2005.

I asked him if he'd like to see the manuscript and he said he would, so last night and this morning I read the MS again and caught a couple of typos.

I mailed it out to him this afternoon.

I had pitched the book to one other publisher--the publisher of Ron Androla's book--and they didn't answer.

So now the manuscript is in play.

Q: What did you think of the book, reading it over?

A: I can't judge my own work. I'm too close to it.

I thought there were some good poems in there.

There were some bad ones, too.

Q: Why didn't you take the bad ones out and leave the good ones in?

A: That's not how I work.

If I write it, it stays in.

The reader can skip.

What one reader doesn't like, another reader will.

Q: What were the circumstances of their production?

A: I called the book COMING OFF, THEN GOING BACK ON SABBATICAL.

The first half of the book I was working and writing both. Trying to place my books.

I did place one. LitVision Press asked to publish Bukowski Never Did This.

When it came out I quit my job and gave myself a grant to sell the book and write books about doing that.

So I spent the second half of the book driving around to book fairs and calling on Panhandle bookstores.

In 25 months I wrote 37 books.

In those 37 books was almost 400 8½ x 11" pages of poems, single-spaced.

Even Bukowski wasn't that prolific. And he didn't have a job.

The stuff came boiling out, like molecules off the cathode of an amplifier tube when you apply a high voltage to the plate.

Q: They were a cry for help. A dance of desperation.

A: That's what's bad about them. That's what's good. They were written in extremis.