Another blue period before a burst of activity.

For me, the beginning of summer has become increasingly bittersweet in recent years.

My wife and I have usually taken our annual vacation by the beginning of June--and there's the post-vacation letdown as I face the prospect of re-entering what's known as "the poetry community."

Although I've told plenty of tales-out-of-school on this blog, there are times when I wish I had the survival instinct of most community members to shut up, suck it up, pull in the metaphorical stomach and not venture unwanted/unwelcome opinions about how/why things are done (plus the sometimes arbitrary forms of literary Darwinism practiced).  I will acknowledge that lots of poets--even those I may not care for personally/aesthetically--work very hard at what they do, even if some feel they have to perform steps A-B-C (usually spelled M-F-A) to get their work taken seriously by academia/publishers/literary agents.

So, as this summer begins, I'm going to resist the temptation to hibernate artistically and resume work on a project which began eleven summers ago.

That project is called HOLLYWOOD POETRY; two chapbooks self-published in 2001 and 2004 were its initial form.  In recent years, I've combined the best of the chapbooks into one volume of poetry and have occasionally made it available as an e-book.

Now begins the process of finding someone to publish HOLLYWOOD POETRY.  It's likely, at this point, that I'll have to resort to self-funding a print-on-demand version through a pay-to-play publisher such as, say, Trafford.  It would be nice to have it published by a local small press, but I fear that HOLLYWOOD POETRY doesn't meet the standards of what is considered "real" poetry.

On the plane from NYC to L.A. earlier this week, I read some of Robert Frost's NORTH OF BOSTON.  HOLLYWOOD POETRY could best be described as a group of stories-in-verse a la Frost's famous "The Death of the Hired Man"--though more humorous.

The odds may be against me, but I'd like to think that HOLLYWOOD POETRY, once it finds it's way into the world as a "proper" print volume/e-book, might find an appreciative audience of poets and nonpoets alike.

Asking those who read this to wish me well.  I'm crossing fingers that the book can be ready by this fall or early 2013.