A poet says goodbye to poetry

[Squigglenob]

I wrote my first poem when I was a senior at Ledford High School in Wallburg, NC. It was called "Octoberfaust," and while it wasn't a terribly good poem, it wasn't bad for a 17 year-old having his first crack at something brand new. My English teacher, Jim Booth, was very encouraging... and a poet was born.

That was in the fall of 1978, which means I have been a poet for nearly 35 years – my entire adult life and then some. During that time I have written four books (none of which are published) containing roughly 119 poems, depending on how you count certain multi-parters. Some have been very short, some have been quite long. A few are fairly conventional, while some are radical in how they challenge our assumptions about form, purpose and content. They cover some predictable subject matter – love and loss, family, life and death, politics, art, literature, poetry – and some less expected topics, like the suite in my most recent book that plays with the hypothetical intersection between trickster tales, Zen spiritualism and quantum physics. They lionize those I revere and savage those I feel have done me wrong. Some look hard at the world around me, while many cast a frank eye on the fucked up emotional terrain inside my head.

I think I'm pretty good (although, as you'll see shortly, this opinion is not unanimously held). The Butterfly Machine, completed last summer, is my masterpiece, such as it is, and the other three books all have something to commend them. A number of the poems have been published: some have appeared in traditional places that are highly regarded (like Cream City Review) or were before they closed their doors (New Virginia Review, Amaranth Review, High Plains Literary Review, Poet & Critic). Others have been pubbed (or are forthcoming) in the small, innovative new journals and anthologies that I believe represent the future of poetry (like Dead Mule, Amethyst Arsenic, Pemmican, Poetry Pacific, Manifest West, and Uncanny Valley).

I have also been rejected. Boy howdy, have I been rejected. I've been blown off by the biggest journals in all of literature, and I've also been sent on my way by small, obscure outlets (and everything in between). I couldn't really tell you what the ratio of rejections to acceptances has been, but a whole lot to not many. In sum, while I think I'm a great writer and have found a few editors who agree, we are a minority. And not an especially large one.

I'm incredibly proud of my publication credits and am grateful to the editors who saw the value in my writing. To each of them, and to all the friends and colleagues who have supported me along the way, I'd like to say a huge thanks. You have no idea what you have meant to me.

With that said, I'm here today to announce my retirement from poetry...

Read the rest by Samuel Smith at Scholars & Rogues.