The reason I haven’t posted much in recent months is that I’ve been quite busy working on two projects, one of which is the publication of Rumsfeld’s Sandbox, my collection of poetry based on my experiences in the Iraq War. But let me qualify that statement.

I don’t consider myself a war poet. I am a poet. It’s true that I’ve been lunged onto a battlefield. But I didn’t go there willingly and I refuse to glorify a war effort with which I disagree. It is my firm position that the Iraq War – its conception and initiation – is unjust. So Rumsfeld’s Sandbox could be aptly called “unjust war poetry”.

Why I Chose To Publish Online

When you’ve been living with a group of poems for as long as I have, you are ready to unleash them. There is as much power in the unleashing as in the writing.

It’s been four years since I’ve returned from Iraq, five years since writing my first poem related to it. Some of the poems in Rumsfeld’s Sandbox had first drafts composed in the desert. Others didn’t make it to life until my return. But I have spent the last five years of my life living with these poems – sleeping with them, eating them, regurgitating them, playing with them, fighting with them, loving them and hating them.

I seriously considered seeking an established publisher. I’m confident I would have found one. But I’d have spent a lot of time looking. Honestly, I’m ready to give up the ghost.

I am fully confident the poems in Rumsfeld’s Sandbox are excellent work. But, of course, one cannot judge one’s own literary value. That judgment must come from the marketplace – the readers, who often can be more honest critics than the reviewers. Nevertheless, I chose to self-publish for a few good reason.

1. No. 1, as noted, I was ready to get them out there. Expediency was a value that I held and still do. I didn’t want to spend an additional year looking for a publisher.
2. More than that, I wanted to take a calculated risk, but I didn’t want to give my work away. Much of the poetry that is published online is published as a blog, with each blog post entered as an individual poem. Much of it is also quite maudlin.
3. And finally, I am comfortable in certain formats and like to experiment in the age of the digital presentation. I thought I’d publish Rumsfeld’s Sandbox in a format that I have become familiar with but that would also afford me an opportunity to pave a new path for publishers. I found that in a blogging software I am familiar with called WordPress.

Once I decided to self publish, I thought I’d offer readers a chance to preview my poetry before committing a full $12-$15, which is the going price for a published book of poems these days. So Rumsfeld’s Sandbox is currently being offered as a paid subscription blog with the subscription price being attributed to the price of the print book when I make it available later this summer.

How Much Does Rumsfeld’s Sandbox Cost?

I wanted to make the digital version of Rumsfeld’s Sandbox affordable. After all, why offer a preview if it is too costly? The point is to provide an affordable alternative so that readers who do not want to purchase the entire book upon publication do not invest more than they are willing to part with. So I’ve decided to place the price for the online version of Rumsfeld’s Sandbox at $1.99. Again, for readers who will go on and purchase the book in print later, that will be attributed to the price of the print version so the blog is efectively free for them.

More Than Just A Blog

I am proud of the work I’ve done on Rumsfeld’s Sandbox. But it is more than just a group of poems on the Internet. It is a multimedia presentation. Subscribers will receive:

• Downloadable PDF broadsides
• Audio versions of the poems on the same page as the written poem (and you can also download these to distribute to your friends for free).
• Videos of me reading the poems (not all of these have been uploaded yet, but this is a benefit you don’t typically get from a poetry blog)
• Essays on Just War doctrine (again, not uploaded yet but these will shed light on Just War theory for those not familiar with it)
• The ability to respond to the poems with comments as you would any other blog. You can even enter into discussions with other subscribers.

I have gone to great extent to include as much value in Rumsfeld’s Sandbox as I could. I want subscribers to get all the benefit with little of the expense and I am so confident that you will like the poems that you will be interested in the book when it appears in print.

Why Now?

The official launch of Rumsfeld’s Sandbox was Friday, March 19, 2010. That was the seventh anniversary of the bombing of the presidential palace in Iraq. The full invasion took place one day later. So this was the perfect time to launch a book as a stand against unjust war.

I hope you’ll accept my invitation to subscribe to Rumsfeld’s Sandbox. If not, at least do me a favor and pass the word to your friends. Join. Discuss. Meditate on them.

Go to http://www.rumsfeldssandbox.com now.

I am in the process of redesigning both the World Class Poetry website and this blog. It’s a slow go as the poetry site alone has more than 200 pages and I’m making some significant improvements that I hope will make the site more social. Aside from that, I am also continuing to review books and work my day job, which many people have told me not to quit. They’ll be glad to know that I’ve taken their advice.

At any rate, just dropping in for a report. Look for more news soon.

It’s not all that common that you’ll find a journal that will print previously published material. But it clearly states in the guidelines that Breadcrumb Sins will accept previously published poems. I sent them one that had been published in my local newspaper and I’ve been wanting to get it a wider distribution. I believe it’s one of my best poems. Phil loved it. Thanks Phil!

“Old Goth” is the title of the poem. You can read it along with two others – “Nocturne: Battlefield Sonnet” and “The Markets” – at Breadcrumb Sins (direct link). Be sure to rate the poems using the stars at the top of the page.

On another note, World Class Poetry is in transition. I’ve got some new changes coming at the beginning of the year. As a result of my focus on moving this blog and World Class Poetry into a new direction, I’ll be posting less frequently until the changes are complete. Thanks for reading!

I’ve been fighting a cold now for three days. So no video today. We’ll be picking back up on video Friday next week.

I will still be involved enough that I will not be completely rid of certain interactions. I’ll still be involved in baseball and Cub Scouts and baby sitting the little red head who thinks I hung the moon. But as for refereeing spats between the two school-age children, I’ll leave that for their mother and her juvenile live in.

My wife and I have looked forward to being grandparents again for about a year now, and when it finally happened I started getting a run of bad news, which only served to steal much of the associated joy. To begin with, this blog started suffering from severe technical issues a couple of weeks before the children left us. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time working on fixing those, to little avail.

Then, on the weekend that we dropped the little ones off to live with their incubator, I learned that my last surviving grandparent – my mother’s aunt and adopted mother – died unexpectedly from an injury she sustained from bumping her head after a fall. She was 92.

Such events cause an overwhelming feeling of mortality – and fragility. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt more human than I did on hearing that the only grandmother, out of three, that I ever really knew is no longer with us. But I’ve always seen the final curtain call as just another event in this stage play we call life.

One day I was sleeping in a tent with my wife enjoying the rain pelting us from above and the next I was a few thousand feet in the air on my way to spend critical moments with family members I hadn’t seen in more than 10 years. In some cases it was more than 20. Thinking on it now reminds me of The Big Chill.

The juxtaposition of these two events in my life – the grandchildren, who have been more like children to us, leaving us and the passing of Aunt Bab, as we all called her – sufficiently distracted me from my day-to-day routine that I’ve found it difficult to focus on the details of my business or spend the time necessary to fix the technical issues related to this blog. Finally, I was able, just last night, to see to it that the blog was restored and made live again. Although I am not completely sure it is 100%.

In restoring the blog I’ve had to take some drastic measures, one of which was deleting all WordPress subscriber accounts. If you registered as a user of World Class Poetry Blog so that you could leave comments then I’m afraid you’ll have to re-register. I apologize for the inconvenience, but it was a necessary action. Furthermore, if you want to comment on the blog in the future you’ll have to login to comment every time. Again, I apologize for the inconvenience this will cause but it is a necessary security measure.

There have been times in the past month when I wanted to write a post to inform you of new web pages or developments at World Class Poetry and have been unable to. I will let you in on some of those in just a few minutes.

For now, I’d like to thank you for your continued interest in this blog and for those of you who continue to come back and read, comment, and needle me when I’m wrong, I am eternally grateful for your presence. This blog, I’d like you to know, is not all about me even if it sometimes appears that I think it is. I would not have a platform were it not for readers and commentators so I appreciate all of you. Please keep coming back and interacting.

As I approach this blog’s second anniversary I can now (hopefully) begin integration of a new growth and development phase that I’ve been contemplating for a few months. You’ll begin to see gradual changes in the blog over time as I make the move to a larger, more diverse publishing enterprise. I’ll be discussing this in more detail in future posts.

Meanwhile, what’s new with World Class Poetry? A lot, actually. For starters, I’ve added a new member of my team, which to date has consisted solely of I (and you thought there was no I in team). Jack Peachum is a poet who has been published widely in print and I’m proud to say that he is now writing content for World Class Poetry. So far he has produced three new pages for me, namely:

• Imagism Poetry Movement
• Symbolism Poetry Movement
• Ezra Pound: Modernism’s Man Of Action

I think you’ll find Jack’s prose to be very readable and his knowledge of the subject matter unmatched. The information presented is still elementary. Many high school students use the site for research so we are trying to maintain a certain level of elementary knowledge to encourage more of this. However, plans are under way to include more in-depth material on the subject matter of poetry in all its manifestations.

In addition to Jack’s pages – and there will be many more soon – I’ve added some new book reviews:

• Poems For The Utopian Nihilist by Milo Martin
• Whispers of Madmen by Matt Fontana and R.G. Bell

And two new issues of Hyperbole have gone out as well:

• The Whispers Of Ezra Pound (And Other Madmen)
• Where The Poets Live

Plus, there are three new digital chapbooks available for download along with the World Class Poetry Toolbar. Their titles are:

• Irreverent Twits
• The Heart Of A Sailor by M. Kei
• Dinkle Dorkle And Other Nut Cases

Finally, I was hoping to have this out much sooner, but as the story goes, life has its own plans.

I’ve performed my poem “Cigar” in video for you. It’s not much, just a little play with lighting and a scruffly, ugly face. Something I’ve been looking forward to doing for a while, playing around with video. I hope to be able to do more of this in the coming year. Meanwhile, enjoy “Cigar”:

Just one more thing: If the site goes down again, I apologize. I half expect it to and half not. If it does it will mean I have a database dysfunction. I’ve tested everything else. But if it does then I will do what I need to do to re-emerge and continue producing commentary on 21st century poetry. Bear with me and I’ll do my best to fight through the pain. With your help, World Class Poetry Blog will rise again and live forever.

But this post isn’t about the military. I just wanted to announce a new page on the World Class Poetry website. But for the first time, it’s not a page that I had a hand in producing.

Two years ago I had students from a local high school write pages for the site for which they received extra credit from their teacher, the poet Dana Larkin Sauers. Many of those pages required heavy editing, though the information was stellar and I appreciate the effort those students put into the writing. It allowed me to add many new pages to the site in a much shorter time frame that I could have done alone.

Recently, however, I’ve had the assistance of another writer who has produced a page for World Class Poetry and I’m very excited to present that page to you now. Jack Peachum has written a good overview of The Imagists and that page is now live.

I’d like you to welcome Jack to World Class Poetry. You can consider him a staff writer. I have decided that I’ll never be able to reach my publishing goals without assistance from other lovers of poetry who can write informational content for all levels of skill and experience. If you think that you might like to join World Class Poetry and write informational content like the one Jack produced then get more information on how you can join us and contact me regarding opportunities.

I’m looking forward to more great work from Jack Peachum and I hope you are too.

I am not out of the water yet. The deletion of the previous theme is a test to see if only my theme files are infected. I’ll know in a matter of days.

I want to thank my regular readers for your patience. Once I’m certain that the malware has been completely removed I will redesign World Class Poetry and resume normal posting with some exciting additions. 

Please note that the problem was not caused by me, but by a hacker who installed a Javascript in one of the files on this website. It’s a common problem with blogging software and content management systems, particularly when they have not been upgraded to the latest version. While World Class Poetry wasn’t operating on an extremely old version of WordPress, it was still on an earlier version (2.7) and I believe that’s what allowed the hackers to gain easy access to this blog. I have now upgraded to WordPress 2.8.3, only days old. Trust me when I say that I will take measures to ensure this doesn’t happen again and I apologize to all readers who may have been affected by this event.