I don’t know why, but I’ve waited quite a while to send out a chapbook manuscript.
This week, I very suddenly submitted my chapbook “Holy Book Centos” to a number of fantastic places. This, at least two years after arranging the first of the poems.
Maybe I’ve played these poems pretty close to the chest because I arrange scriptural texts into poems and I’m worried how they would be received by spiritual people, well, let’s face it, by religious people.
The compiling and arranging of the poems, line by line, was done without much consideration for dogma. The whole chapbook comes from the idea that these spiritual texts I used were meant to discover something greater than any individual person or culture can really understand.
If Ezra Pound was right in saying that no single earthly language is capable of containing all of human experience (he said something like that in ABCs of Reading), then that is doubly true for spiritual language.
While I think my intentions and results are good, others might not.
I’m happy I sent them out. At least the few readers and editors who may come across them will read one or two, and that might amount to some purpose for them. Hopefully, someone will see more in them.
A few are out in the world already. Check them out at Jet Fuel Review and UnLost Journal.
I wonder, do you send poems and essays out as soon as you’ve written them? Do you write and dish without hesitation? Or do you take time, stew a bit? Are you a tinkerer or do you just let the thing ferment for a while?
Dan Dorman 