522. Collection at the Intersections of Science and Poetry (and Song)

First off, to say this is a touchy subject for me... because all my poetry and lyrics are deeply embedded in thoughts and themes of science. The question is, how have science and poetry become so distinct, so divided? As I was scrounging around through the internet, I learned that a lot of early scientists and explorers expressed their knowledge through art and poetry. Haeckel is an obvious case, Darwin wrote a prose adventure novel on the origins of the species... and I encountered someone who wrote poetry about developmental biology. Scientific expression through artful means was rather common.

But then somehow through time, science and art started to split to a point in which scientists and artists in the same room would look at each other like they just sited a pack of aliens across the room. Milton Love and I even discussed this theme... somehow through time, the structure of scientific expression transformed from artful and emotionally driven to logical, robotic, emotionally-absent, highly precise, verbiage that no one intuitively enjoys reading, including scientists themselves (me being one). I told Milton that writing a scientific paper became meaningless as I discovered that it was like filling out a form and that only 10 people in the world was going to read it. But then again, as I discovered the difficulties of publishing POETRY and SHORT STORIES, I started to realize that ... well, at least I get my scientific paper published, and THANKFULLY ten people read it. I announced to Hector in the car a couple weeks back, "It is officially easier to publish a scientific article than a poem," and then my heart sunk as I scratched my head, "And a lot of the published poems SUCK, the poets already established a big name, and they say nothing in particular... geee, this is really sad." And THEN, I realized the SOLUTION to this double-edged sword (as I spoke with Barry Spacks) was TO MAKE A FILM ABOUT BEING REJECTED BY DOING SOMETHING MEANINGFUL AND BEING ACCEPTED DOING SOMETHING THAT HAS LOST MEANING OR VALUE. And that, would be meaningful! *Sigh*

Captions from Above Slideshow: Collection at the Intersection of Science and Poetry (and Song). Well?! I've written over 500 blogs, I can say it's extremely surprising that I'm covering such a topic "so late in the game." I've bene having a long-term discussion with Barry Spacks on the intersection of scientific knowledge and creative storytelling for the last two years now... and have learned sooo much... but at this point, I am paying particular attention to the inter-relationships between science and (specifically) poetry, as brought to the forefront through NCEAS'-Santa Barbara Poet Laureate gathering last June of 2009 (where Barry presented a poem, I was so excited to review it before its presentation!). In addition, as an undergraduate, I happened to run into a few oddball poems in the middle of my science textbooks and handouts... so I just started to save a few snipits of other people's work, and I sincerely hope the collection grows!

The Poetry of Science. June 5, 2009. 8pm. Fe Bland Forum at SBCC. Sponsored by The National Center fo Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. Santa Barbara City College Creative Writing Program. Santa Barbara Laureate. My professor Barry Spacks (or poetry pal?) presented a poem and the only metaphor I remember out of the whole event (a year later) is how scientists behave like swarms of bees. Some snipits of Barry's poem: “Mostly she likes to count, to fill spreadsheets, to sample populations, invent software,” he read, garnering laughs from the audience, including Ryan, who stood on stage with him. “Oh, scientists so like to count! And foremost to get it right! While we slovenly poets need wild elixir for our work..." Noozhawk wrote an article on the event HERE. :

PDF of the Poetry of Science can be found here: http://sites.google.com/site/stokastika2/poetryprogramfullfinal5inorder.pdf.

"This is How Shxt Happens" Poem that I yanked off of Dr. Raul Suarez' office door to make a photocopy. We both tried to find the source of this poem but it was futile (one of Dr. Suarez' predecessors). Most likely it was an imitation of a well-known poem of "This is How Shxt Happens" in the corporate world. Fall of 2008. (probably will include in an essay in Ecology of Scale / Environmental Metaphors). Written on the Blog 105 .

"When a Fellow Needs a Friend" icthyological (fishy) poem by the esteemed Dr. Milton Love. Found in the book "Probably More Than You [Ever] Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast." This poem captures the miniscule parasitic male clamping onto the gigantous female of anglerfish. Whacky and very sexually exploritative! Uploaded Fall of 2007. Blog found at http://www.biologicallyincorrect.org/2007/09/two-and-half-poems-by-dr-milton-love.html (Two and a Half Poems by Milton Love).

"Reproductio Ad Absurdum" icthyological (fishy) poem by the esteemed Dr. Milton Love. Found in the book "Probably More Than You [Ever] Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast." This poem explores the bold and edgy notion of sex changes in fishes (wrasses, basses specifically). Uploaded Fall of 2007. Blog found at http://www.biologicallyincorrect.org/2007/09/two-and-half-poems-by-dr-milton-love.html (Two and a Half Poems by Milton Love).

Page 1. "Sweet Parasite Lovin'" Spoken Word by Martin Moretti, as found in my Parasitology Laboratory/Handbook from Dr. Armand Kuris' epic UCSB course... back in 2003.... Sigh... I still wish I were still an innocent undergrad... (missing poem Ode to an Alga)

"Digital" Lyrics by Mia Doi Todd. Last quarter I had the golden opportunity to watch her and Michel Gondry perform at Spaceland in Silverlake, California, though unfortunately she did not sing this song, which is potentially my favorite of hers. Though the lyrics metaphorically detail some form of intense male-female relationship, the metaphors evoke scale in a scientific fashion.

The one very weak spot in the entire tune is use of the term "plastic bag lubricated safety tube." All lyrics were surreal and metaphorical, and then this moment of precise, literal, and TACKY language destroyed the essence of the song--the worst part is that Mia ACCENTUATES these words when SINGING! I cringe every time I pass through this part.... Maybe that is why this song is not super famous, which it deserves to be. I think a more benign, and metaphorical term like "love glove" would be more appropriate... and the strange thing is that she had NO RHYMES to constrain her word choice... and still decided to use such gnarly words!

Refer to BLOG 454, an analysis of "The Fish" by Elizabeth Bishop.

"Science and Poetry" is like this whole can of worms I just opened... A can of worms so large I feel it's even worth exploring for an entire quarter, like in a College of Creative Studies Course (e.g. Bruce Tiffney and Hank Pitcher go out to Sedgwick Ranch and both offer commentary on landscapes when designing artwork depicting landscapes).

Here are some websites and names that may serve as starting points:

http://www.firstscience.com/home/poems-and-quotes/poems.html
Classic poets address science in their works.

http://www.helpstoknow.com/html/ps/
An attempt toward a first e-zine devoted to the intersection of science and poetry. Seems pretty dead right now, but it's certainly the right idea!

Of course, there are endless resources on Ecocriticism, "Nature Poetry" (like in Orion)... etc...

And then... just in the last hour I encoutered more than enough media classified in the "LAME" category... or "SUPER LAME" and "SUPER TACKY" category. For example, I encountered this Youtube video entitled "The Symphony of Science," and it was essentially old footage of science figureheads (Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Michael Shermer, to name a few...) with altered voices to make it seem like they were singing to some techno music track. Ummm... I'm sorry, if people were inspired by this piece (as state on Youtube comments), I could say this was more disturbing than inspirational. There was no sense of artfulness in the visual aspects, though quite a bit of technical music skills were portrayed (plus a lot of patience to dig through old video footage)! I'm trained as a scientist and I could barely watch any of these music videos. In all truth, I am appalled that there is recycling of old footage "old science icons" rather than generating new icons, characters, adventures...

Another tacky hit I got was a video called Science Cheerleader and it ended up being a bunch of ditzy blond (some were blond) high school girls waving pom poms and narrating "fun facts" about physics and chemistry and advocating that science was cool. Ummm... this honestly to me... was a bit degrading... to both parties... the cheerleaders no longer looked cool and the scientists were being associated with ditzy cheerleaders supposedly saying intelligent things (without demonstrating much comprehension of their knowledge).

So, the reason is that WHY I am in environmental media, is because the old "science and society stories" are OLD and the ICONS are the same old icons... and novelty is needed.... I'm also environmental media because I want to make Tackiness and Lame go EXTINCT.

500. Prose Poem Entitled "The Intergalactic Tide of HyperAssociations" (oh ya, far out!) Greek Mother and Garlic

OMG! I can't believe it! It's blog 500! OMG! OMG! OMG! You would think this blog would contain "extra special content," but it turns out that it doesn't, really.... Just the continuous stream of enviroexistential consciousness... can never get enough of it (my own personal disease or blessing, however other's perceive it)!

The PDF for the above PROSE POEM can be found here:

http://sites.google.com/site/stokastika2/intergalactictideofhyperassociationspoemfinal.pdf.
What's the poem about: (1) modes of thinking in my family, Buddhist cousin-aunt who states everything relates to everything else, scientist father who needs data to connect the dots, and Greek mother who uses one thing to connect all dots... and not only that... solve all your problems... aka "The Garlic Paradigm" over the My Big Fat Greek Wedding's "The Windex Theory." My sister got my mom a "garlic" stuffed animal/plant at Gilroy last year... just to rub it in... I guess.... (2) mother also steps back and says that no one can control anyone else, it's up to your self, but then she has these subtle ways of controlling you, and impacting your life....

To take a step back from all this familial absurdity, I can say that everyone has their quirks, including myself, and despite my mother's passion for garlic, on the borderline of obsession (but then again, I've seen scientists equally as obsessed with their research), I love her very much, and I know that several other people have quirks that are much, much worse than the Garlic Paradigm.

Though my mother has strange theories, she was actually RIGHT and AHEAD OF THE GAME, in two particular situations. The first thing my mother did was avoid HYDROGENATED TRANS FATS. I even did a science fair project relating to this subject at age 15 and pissed off the Head Science Fair judge when I told him that trans fats are linked with cancer and heart problems. I would have gone to the state fair, but I pissed off... unfortunately... the head judge. And then ten years later, there is this MASSIVE BAN of trans-fat products on the market, from margarine to Cheetohs. My mom? "See. I told you so." I really wished I knew this was going to happen when I was 15 years old. Then I wouldn't have taken the loss as badly as I did. The second thing my mother did to the family was deprive us of beef, starting age 15. Man, that was TOUGH to swallow; I had to mentally X off bazillions of billboard signs advertising burgers from Carl's Junior and In-and-Out. I felt like my mother was placing me in a cage.... But then again... ten years later, people start affiliating this fast-food beef consumption with heart and a whole suite of health problems. Like DUH! And now it's kind of a big deal as to whether the cows were grass-fed... or fed gxd knows what otherwise....

[I was just interrupted by a stoner/tweaker at the Kinkos. This is the third stoner Cannibis seller I have met at this Kinkos. He lied to me saying he was going to call his wife, and he ended up talking on the phone and bugging me for 15 minutes. Then leaves without saying good-bye. Jules has a huge problem with the whole stoner/tweaker scene; they use you. I had an encounter with a stoner who survived a very bad beating up in Weed / Yreka, California (surprisingly). He was missing teeth, eating a sandwich at a gas station. He ended up interviewing me, though I was supposed to be the "interviewer" of Roadtrip Nation. He then showed me where he was growing his batch up in the hills around us, filled with pine trees. Very difficult to hunt down for a police officer. He informed me that this area was like the weed distributor for the whole country, particularly the East Coast. I can't believe this. Why do I encounter these people in the first place?]

Nevertheless, this Garlic Paradigm of my own family drama has been proven to be the source of others' kicks and giggles, as I had to write a mock op-ed piece for the first-ever Santa Barbara Write-off Competition, hosted by Dr. Cherie Steinkellner, at the 2008 Santa Barbara Writer's Conference. As a matter of fact, it seems like I am collecting quite a list here of comical family drama blogs, including "Full Moon Research" and "White Elephant Christmas Game." But neverthelss, the Garlic Paradigm of my Greek Mother was featured on Blog 237. It was fun to be able to make a whole room of writers (many of them professional and published) bust up laughing about my disastrous childhood relationship with food, through the medium of my mother's pseudo-science research. It's so old, so "normal" to me, that I didn't laugh. I was a total straight face, completely immune to my story, more so dead serious! But people couldn't even believe the Garlic Paradigm and the gargle-raw-garlic-down-your-throat-story was actually true! Yes, sad, but true. My mother regrets the garlic gargling....

So, the question is now... WHY and HOW did this Garlic Paradigm get revived in my head? I know this may sound a bit crazy in the way how I "hyper-associate" ideas (I'm a victim myself), but what happened is that in a lengthy conversation with Mike Davis, he recommended my reading Chapters 15 and 16 of Dead Cities, and one of the chapters (15) discussed the role of asteroids in shaping geologic time. In short, extraterrestrial objects are the geologic/planetary symbol that "break the endless cyclicity of geologic thinking" and impose a layer of nonlinearity to geologic narrative, the overall narrative of life on earth. But one part of the chapter I would say was on the borderline of science and science fiction or pseudo science, some of the most off-the-wall geology stories I have ever heard of. Some geologist was theorizing / suggesting the "cyclicity" of asteroid bombardments, as he was using these terms "Intergalactic Tides" and "resonancies," I almost choked laughing. Geologists already have it really rough in terms of having limited evidence to reconstructing Earth's history, but then to concoct some kind of multi-million-year-asteroid-rhythmicity was a little bit like a five-year-old trying to bullshxt his way through a science paper he had write for class the next day... so ideas tend to come from your behind. Except these ideas weren't that bad. We'll say the five-year-old kid was quite bright. Michel Gondry type. [Man, there are SOOO many weirdos, whackos at Kinkos Goleta today!]

I felt that this scientist's mind was quite "hyper-associative" with his thinking, trying to overly connect the dots without valid, tangible evidence to connect them--this is not Mike Davis' research, Mike synthesized this dude's asteroid research--and that's when the trio of thinking in my family emerged... Zen Buddhist Aunt, Scientist Father, and Garlic Paradigm Mother. The issue was not necessarily the garlic, but I compared this intergalactic tide scientist to the excessive hyperassociative mentality of my mother. Garlic just happened to be the asteroid.

Update #1 on August 15, 2010 ~ Two updates here. First update. It was just my birthday and my mother was so kind to purchase a flan (Maxi Fooods) and pecan pie (Ralphs). It's all great, but I barely ate any, my sister Jenny, barely at any, and my mother ate most of it. My mother, mumsy, Mama. Let's just call her Mama for now. Last time I saw my mother about a month ago, she was crawled up on a couch, eating an entire quart of full fat nasty fake ice scream. I noticed that she has gained some poundage around her waste. Like 10-15 pounds, she looks like she is 3 months pregnant. In a certain way it's good, but in another way it's bad. Ya, fine I have my own problems. I feed myself like insulin drip all day and have a big dinner at night, but I'm all about having meat and veggies and reduce the starch and junky shxt food at all the grocery stores (which consists about 80% of grocery store material).

My mother never had a healthy relationship with food. It's so unhealthy that every time I tell other people stories about "my mother's Windex Theories with food," everyone starts laughing. Her relationship with food is so pathetic is that she is a living joke to everyone else. I have made so many people laugh with my mother's food-obsession stories that I want to cry right now. And the worst part is that she imposes her fxcked up food theories on my father, my sister, me, and several other people. And this is where I am very upset, because right now, despite all her watching of religious television shows, she is a walking hypocrite.

So, my mother fixates on a few items and declares them "cure-alls." I'm sure the whole family rejoiced when my mother stopped eating garlic has her universal windex theory. Her breath and the whole house would reek of garlic. She would place garlic everywhere, in everything, in my father's tacos, in her water, anything! She also supplements her garlic theory with some bi-weekly "cure-your-body-because-the-doctor-can't" food, which has included potatoes, bananas, yogurt, peas, pepper, chicken, ground turkey. Well, ya, it sounds all healthy, but when you eat potatoes for 15 days straight, you get fxcking sick of it! But then one day she stopped... with the garlic at least... probably after ten years of practicing the Garlic Theory... or is it the Garlic Religion? And she said garlic was "too hard on her stomach." And soon after that she replaced garlic with the Pepper Theory. So, now, my mother places pepper on everything. She eats pepper, morning, mid-day, afternoon, night. She thinks that pepper will solve all her digestive issues. And the worst part is that my mother is supplementing pepper with some of the worst possible foods: eggs, eggs, eggs, eggs, eggs, ice scream, ice scream, ice cream, ice cream, ice cream, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken... and hardly any vegetables. I mean, the egg situation is getting to be very out of control. My father complains how he is being fed eggs too often, and my father has a little bit high blood pressure, so he needs to watch out a little bit his health. My mother is eating sooooo many eggs that if she keeps it up, she can give herself a heart attack or something with an overdose of eggs. And then the icescream? The ice cream? My mother states that she "can't digest milk because of the fortified Vitamin D." And so, she eats a quart of ice scream every day, loaded with sugar, "but non-fortified with Vitamin D, making it digestible." That moment in the living room when my mother was devouring ice scream, I became very angry because I was just told a story by a fisherman who suffered from a "heart attack" because every day he at the most horrible foods... ice scream, cookies, eggs, bacon, and ham. I told Mama, "With all the repulsive foods that you are eating, you have absolutely no right to give me any food advice. And I have a complete right to not listen to you." Just go ahead, go ahead and sprinkle your ice cream with pepper, PLEASE!

And then, if not that, then she's eating a shxtload of chicken. My father is going nuts, and so am I. These are the worst possible foods to fixate on... eggs and ice scream. The doctor says 4 eggs a week, not 8 eggs per day!!! My frickin' gawdzeeks!!! But no, no, and NO! My mother refuses to go to the doctor because doctors can't solve her problems, because she knows MORE than doctors and can control everything in her body. She won't even go for a physical. Lovely, simply lovely. My only consolation is that soon my mother will be going to Greece, and changing one's environment and routine can either lead to a re-evaluation to one's past routines. The trip to Greece will force my mother to be more active and to re-consider her diet to some degree.

My mother ate like a pig at Don Jose, for my "2.9" or "4-year" birthday celebration, depending on what number scale you're on. She finished all these chips and her entire massive burrito (with only chicken inside, of course). I could barely finish 1/3 of my taco salad plus a few chips. And she devoured two massive slices of cake, and she can eat all this crxp food because she sprinkles herself with pepper. I was embarrassed when Marquis was there and my mother was spatting pepper in her water. I told Bubsy in the car, "Mumsy is crazy! She ate the whole burrito!" And then my mother and I took turns telling each other how crazy we were. She was a bit sensitive, but... well, it's true. Sure, laugh. My OCD streak inside me most certainly comes from my mother, that is for sure.

I told Jenny about how I felt and what horrible foods Mama is fixated on, causing her to look like she's 3 months pregnant. It's hard to watch her destroy herself. Dysfunctional mother with dysfunctional eating habits, ingrained in an entire society with a collective dysfunctional eating disorder, as my father said, "Fat people eating shxtty foods, and raising kids who become fat because that's all they look at, and that's all they do, eat megacorporate shxt." So, Jenny said about my mother, "Well, I feel angry. I feel upset. I feel the same way. But you know, you can't change her. She won't listen to you. So, either you can be angry, and make her feel more lonely, or you can just accept her for who she is. She never had a healthy relationship with food anyway. And we all know that." I guess my mother is punching me back since my "anorexic, 6-foot-tall-90-pound days." I remember my mom yelling and screaming at me in the car to eat food and I didn't listen. I couldn't even "hear" what she was saying. So now I'm in her shoes: it's hard to watch someone voluntarily-involuntarily destroy themselves, like I did to myself for a while. You want to help them, but they can't even help themselves. I was just absorbing myself in a depressing, tragic, and very honest book--no, graphic novel, called EPILEPCTIC--and David B had to deal with 40 years of his older brother's going through seizures that could not be controlled or contained. Epilepsy became just as much as the imagination of David B as much as his brother who suffered from it. In this case, his brother had no control. No one had control of the seizures. So, you just have to accept it, deal with it. But with food, when you wake up about yourself and your lifestyle, you can gain control, break and change bad habits into good.

The most agonizing and frustrating aspect about the food issue is that people have some sense of control, and some people have some sense of lack of control. It's a chronic internal battle of adaptation and manipulation of your own body as an ecosystem. You're always in a fine boundary in which food transforms from a survivalistic necessity into a comforting-stress-relief or a cure-all-obsession-medication. Is my mother controlling food, or is the food controlling my mother? It's a two way street, and right now the food, the sugar, the excessive cholesterol, is winning her over.... I hope that the trip to Greece will make her snap out.

My long-time-neighbor-since-I-was-born has transformed into an obese pig. My father has a little professor pot belly, but that's a normal form of human evolution. The professor pot belly is expected. I'm not concerned. But when an ordinary person you knew as a kid blew up into some balloon... you know that she gave up and the food took over her. She's operating on pleasured impulse, not rational control. Tragic. (My mother was viciously scratching herself at one point, like a dog with fleas, to a point of bleeding, but apparently all those scratches healed up and she doesn't have that problem anymore. Thank goodness!).

Update #2 on August 15, 2010 ~ Speaking of which... I wrote a poem above called "The Intergalactic Tide of Hyperassociations" as inspired by reading Mike Davis' book, Dead Cities, which consisted of some of the most absurd theories about astronomical cycles of meteorites hitting planet Earth that... it was just sooo absurd... that it reminded me of my mother's whacko food "Windex Theories." I was able to share the poem to one of Barry Spacks' classes in the Winter of February 2010, which received chuckles from a group of clever undergraduates. It's hard to have high standards for yourself when you are surrounded by students who don't have much writing standards at all... and the worst part is that their egos have been masseussed for the last twenty years, that they think they're going to be the next Michael Chrichton or Danielle Steele (which I don't like either of them, I like Michael Chrichton's medical background, but he writes like an unfeeling robot).... *Sigh* All you can do is continue to encourage students... as B has said. Be more of a confidence coach than a writing coach! So, I had so much confidence, that I sent out a first batch of poems (three poems, actually, including "Sugar Free Sugar" and "The Can Collectors") to the poetry journal called Rattle, which is based in Los Angeles, actually! I was pissed that I had to take down three blogs in order to be able to submit my work to a literary magazine... I just re-posted the blogs back up!!! I suppose I was convinced to submit my work to Rattle because (1) Rattle is local, so I can relate, and I could actually meet the editors if I wanted to when driving through Los Angeles, (2) Tim Green, one of the major editors, is a veteran of the professional writing program at USC, and he was a chemist before he ventured into creative writing (Go figure he's a science-art hybrid! one of his books of poems is called American Fractal), (3) The literary journal actually LOOKS COOL! Most literary journals I have encountered have such bizarre art and formatting--so they say it's avant garde--I say is plain lack of artistic taste (even the editor of Rutger's Writer's Bloc has said so)! So, it was really awesome that I received a nice note from the editor about a week later: "Thanks for letting us consider some of your work, Victoria. We'll get back to you soon -- typically takes about a month, sometimes just a touch longer, but feel free to query if you haven't heard back by the end of March. Looking forward to the read. Best, Tim."

I submitted in the "humor" category, hoping that I would placed in a smaller pile of paperwork... but unfortunately and of course, my poems were "rejected." But that's expected! Even Ray Bradbury was rejected hundreds of times, three years in a row, in his early twenties before he had one story published. Still again, I go through all this psychological grief and effort to submit, and take down my blogs, and receive a rejection letter... by email. Ya, ya. I love you too. These poems are dxmn good, and I KNOW IT. So, I spoke with Barry Spacks about the experience, and he even admitted to me that his work has still yet to be accepted into Rattle. And then he told me something daunting: Barry has about 300 poems submitted to different journals all at once. And I guess he's fortunate if he gets a couple dozen published every year! 300 poems distributed all at ONCE??? What the hxll?!!

I started to feel how futile it was to submit poetry to magazines. (1) Too many people are participating (too many people have the supposed "capacity" to write poems, from five-year-olds to 95-year-olds) (2) So many people are participating that the editors of literary journals don't treat you with much care, and they don't respond to you anymore... as Barry said, "things are slipping" (3) Poetry as an artform is largely dead in a society of information overload, with menial value placement of the constructions and organization of words. (4) People publish your poetry because your poetry has been published before (Old Boyz Club scenario). And the list goes on. As I mentioned in a past blog, Barry stated that he is trying sooo hard to preserve intimacy in a society in which no one particularly cares about anybody anymore. He painted this portrait of him crawling across a scorching desert, bypassing any needs for food and water, and on the final utterances before his passing, he would crawl to a computer with internet, and write to all the failed writers who submitted their work (if Barry were an editor) and would provide them the most kind and personal email, "We are sorry we cannot publish your work, but we truly hope with all our hearts that your work will find a home." And I looked at Barry, wondering inside my mind, "Barry, how can you teach poetry and not tell them some stories of reality?! That poetry as an industry is an elitist cult of arbitrary fame and passing-on-of-torches, and that truly, the title of 'poet' as a profession can only be pursued as a teacher or as a poet laureat"? There are only a hundred or so fortunate souls who can make it in America as true "poets," but they most have their hands in poetry through other means, as an editor, a publisher, a teacher, or a show-man-laureat-Billy-Collins-type." And then, I also came to realize that my reading my writing on a computer, with some pre-set Microsoft font, has no personality to it. Has no visual umph to it. It's not home-made in it's entirety. And so, I myself would be willing, with all my heart, to make all my work, as home-made as possible... so adding a visual component to my writing... like cartoons... could only make more sense. Barry? And everyone? I am bitter, but rightfully, and rationally so.