What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
Publishing. There are a tremendous number of superb poets working these days, along with nearly innumerable outlets. Venues for poetry are taxed with nearly impossible tasks: sorting from among this vast number of submissions to find the gems that will reflect the ethos of their editorial vision. Me, I’d rather just write. My writing partner is dragging me into the arenas, but what I find most difficult is sending things out. It’s the drudgery of the art. And when one does succeed (I had a number of acceptances and won three prizes last year), one finds one’s work among a host of other poems that may or may not provide a useful context for one’s work: publication is a feast: of all one’s least favorite foods. I have a number of book manuscripts, and material for perhaps eight or ten books in total, but have yet to get a single volume published. And when I do? I hear Frost’s Witch of Coos: “…and when I’ve done it, what good have I done?”
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