richnewman
richnewman

I’m looking for poets on Micro.blog. Anybody out there?

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smokey
smokey

@richnewman A few, for sure: @rnv, @schuth, and @mwillett (and sometimes I pretend I’m one).

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richnewman
richnewman

@smokey Thanks! Is your work online anywhere?

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smokey
smokey

@richnewman Some of my early works are on my website proper, and I occasionally publish newer works, or snippets thereof, on my blog. Mostly, though, I’m of the Dickinson school these days, scrawling on scraps of paper or digital files here and there which may or may not be found once I am gone… :-)

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smokey
smokey

@richnewman Also, I don’t know if he self-identifies as a poet, but @chet has been publishing a daily haiku here for the past several months.

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rnv
rnv

@richnewman Hello, welcome to Micro.blog! Yes, @smokey is right: I absolutely am, among other things, a poet. I write every day because I have to. However, I have only managed to be sporadically published — a total of maybe ten poems in thirty years. I figure that failing at something for that long is a form of commitment, no?

Anyway, welcome!

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richnewman
richnewman

@smokey So I started to reply to this and the whole page somehow reloaded, so I don't know if this will be redundant: I'm looking forward to checking out your blog. I'm always interested in work by people who write--as it sounds like you do--more or less only for themselves.

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richnewman
richnewman

@rnv I just realized I didn’t reply to this. I meant to say you’re right. That is a commitment. Where have you published?

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smokey
smokey

@richnewman Yes, it’s mostly for off-lifting things that are running around in my head, though on occasion I have written things intended for a larger audience—but that’s still mostly friends and people who experienced something with me.

When I returned to writing semi-regularly a few years ago after more than a decade of rarely doing so, I found that the things I was writing were more deeply personal than in the past, so I’m sharing them much less often than in the early years, but I do still try to share stanzas or other extracts that I’m particularly happy with and feel are sufficiently “safe”. I have one such stanza sitting in a draft blog post I need to finish up, actually.

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richnewman
richnewman

@smokey I just read "Egyptian Journey," which I like a lot, not just the way you capture a more realistic picture of Cairo/Egypt--that is nontheless through an outsider's eyes--but, on a purely personal level, the way it resontes with how I sometimes think (and thought) about Seoul, where I lived in the 1988-89 as an English teacher. It was a life-changing experience that I am still exploring in some ways, in both my writing and my teaching.

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In reply to
smokey
smokey

@richnewman I’m pleased to hear that it resonated with you through your own experiences, because I never know if that one (and others, but that one in particular because I did intend to “say something” to a broader audience with it) is too rooted in my experiences in Egypt to be understood beyond the 11 of us from that summer. I’d guess that my summer in Egypt fits into a similar place in my life as your time in Seoul; that was my first time abroad and nothing was ever the same ever again :-)

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tones
tones

@richnewman i once wrote a poem that got me a girl. does that count? :)

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richnewman
richnewman

@tones That must've been some poem, then!

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richnewman
richnewman

@smokey My own experience has been that poems (and not just poems) that are sufficiently concrete in their own specificity end up speaking very clearly to those "broader audiences" than poems written intentionally to be "more general," a phrase that my students sometimes use when they tell me why they resist the specific, concrete, and particular.

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smokey
smokey

@richnewman That’s good to know.

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