Publishing poems on this website generally excludes the possibility that they can be submitted to a magazine, online publication, etc. This website is, technically, a published medium. I have stopped posting my poems as I write them in part because I want to save some poems, so I can submit to outside publications.

I expect it will be a delicate balancing act—I don’t want this site to get stale, but I need to keep at least some of my “best” material for other publications.

I have been writing at San Diego Writers Ink Tuesday Brown Bag, so that generally produces four pieces a month. I imagine that at least one of those could be posted here, monthly.

In addition to the occasional poem, I’ll post any places I have been published. As I mentioned before, I was accepted in the San Diego Writers Ink “A Year In Ink Vol. VI” anthology. So, stuff like that…

Hopefully, any soul who wanders here can now make sense of what I’m doing here…

So I finished some edits to the poems in “American Method”—it’s now available here, for $1.99.

New Poetic Brew doesn’t happen again until September 18th; I’ll probably have printed, signed versions of my chapbook available for free there. So, if you live in San Diego, you can check that out.

I’m still considering doing a “Spoken Word Album” of the chapbook, and making that available on iTunes. I’m looking into online audio publishing services now…

At first, the new chapbook was to have thirteen poems in it. I love the number thirteen—it has gotten a bad rap, much like black cats. Two poems were not really “chapbook-quality” for me, though (as noted in this post). Today, I realized that I really don’t have any Earth-shaking edits that will make “Zero” a better poem; it was a fun tribute to Sylvia Plath, but that’s all it was.

I’ll just have to explore the profound relationship I have with my chihuahua in another, later, poem I guess. Profound relationship? Well, we got him just after Adrian’s cancer surgery. Also, I think my chihuahua is the only being on Earth who understands—unhindered by assumption or complication—what I am going through with my Lupus. So, yes, profound…

Anyway, I feel the ten poems I’ve collected for “American Method” make for a really solid chapbook. Also, I think I might record the poems on mp3 and put them up on iTunes. For money, of course—especially since the printed chapbook is free (as is this very website), I need some kind of a publishing “model” or whatever.

Update: the Kindle-formatted draft is ready; I just need to workshop one last poem and it will be done!

Tentatively, the title is “American Method” and there will be either eleven or twelve poems in it, depending if I ultimately decide to include something I just wrote this morning.

I’m omitting Generation and What I Learned From Rilke And Lao Tzu because I don’t quite feel that those poems represent my best work. My chapbooks are supposed to be something more “edited” and final than the free-flowing approach I have with this site.

No Kindle link yet—I can’t really publish to Kindle until the chapbook is totally finalized, and since I’m still mulling over some things… and maybe I should take advantage of my writing group this coming Monday, as it’s my “turn” for review.

…so, if I do a minor edit to one poem, and a major edit to another poem, I’ll have about 13 good poems I can put into a new chapbook. The last chapbook only had 11, so hey why not? Of course, I realize that there’s a poem or two that should just fade into the forgotten memories of the never-visited “Older Posts” link…

Last chapbook, I was over-stuffed with ideas for a title. Now, not so much… I genuinely feel so absorbed in the material that I don’t really have a macro “meta” point of view. There’s a bit of smug hipster-ish “yay me!” in that… but just as it’s possible to get too caught up in the trappings of self-publishing, it’s equally easy to devote too little attention to it all—these days especially, with so much competing for a reader’s interest, it’s important to telegraph a message/brand/identity with a title. Which begs the question: what most defines my work in the past three months?

I am trying to parse out the poems into sections—the poems to my own personal Mr. W.H. (here, here, and here) will be grouped together, for example.

I’m still of two minds over “What I Learned From Rilke And Lao Tzu” . . . But 13 is one of my favorite numbers, and I don’t know if I want to include any of the nascent poems I’ve got stewing in my skull in this chapbook.

I’ll be giving out the physical chapbook free, again. On the one hand, it’s not really a “profitable” publishing model, but then again I’m not really doing the poetry with the expectation of making any kind of a living from it. From what I understand, there are only like two or three traditionally successful (i.e. dead-tree “published”) poets that support themselves without the aid of academia, an editorial job, etc.

I do think these poems are more focused than my previous chapbook. I have noticed that I’ve grown less generally observational, and more heavily symbolic; I used to just describe things, and let the connotations do their work for me… now I force meanings and connections more directly. The poet of my first chapbook would never be so bold as to claim, “and I saw God in a circuit” for example.

If you’d like to spend money, but can’t stand the thought of laying out a whole $2-$3 for an actual physical chapbook, Amazon has my chapbook on Kindle for $0.99…

You know what? It took me longer to get the formatting “just right” for Kindle than it did for print! Of course, it would have helped if the InDesign plug-in wasn’t buried deep within their Kindle self-publishing resources.

While I guess this is “selling out” in some abstract way, you can still read all my poems for free here, on brianthedell.com; I opted-out of signing up for Kindle “exclusive” just so I could keep them up. They’re just not all pretty-fied and Kindle-ready on this website. Also, reading on this site, you have to pick through my sucky poems to get to the decent ones, (but I’m sure you know that).

So I have a Chapbook: “A Sudden Taste Of Blood On The Lip”

Yay! I know I barely have enough (good) material to make a chapbook, but after discovering how easy it is to lay them out in InDesign, I decided to give it a go. A few hours and $30* later, I have 20 copies, each with 16 pages (double sided) + cardstock cover! They’re folded over into half-size of 8 1/2 x 11. The poems included are:

Second World
Desert Traveling
A Space Cadet’s Coloring Book
Momentum
Weight
Light And Time
With Apologies To Jethro Tull
A Bit About Love
April’s Cruelty
Battle For The Author’s Soul
Ripping Out Pages

Of course, all of these poems are already posted here, on BrianThedell.com; if you’d like something (hard) published, or would like to show your interest/support, or whatever, then donate** $2-$3 to cover printing and postage and I’ll send you a signed chapbook. Or you can show up to May’s New Poetic Brew, here in San Diego, and get a copy for free!

*They gave me a discount, actually… Thanks Copy2Copy!

**Using the handy new “Donate” button at the bottom left of the menus…