Free Chapbook: Crazy White Devil
It’s been years since I created a chapbook.
Six, to be exact.
I released Selected Squares of Concrete — a de facto “best of” poetry collection of new, revised, never-before-released and old favorites — back in March of 2003, smack in the middle of the razor-thin slice of time between my return to the NYC poetry scene after living down in Virginia for a year, and my walking away from it again about three months later, more or less permanently.
I’ve wanted to create a new chapbook for a little while now, just for myself, to collect in one place the handful of newer poems I’d written over the past few years, for those random times I end up at a poetry reading and want to get on the mic. Like last night, for example, when I decided to check out my local poetry reading and had to dig through a pile of random poems, several of which were 2-3 edits old, to find something I liked.
It was interesting reading in a totally unfamiliar setting with only one other person I knew in the small audience, and there were a couple of poets there I would have liked to have had something to give, partly to promote Spindle, but also to establish myself in the scene since I’m a terrible self-promoter.
That’s when the idea hit me; an experiment in social networking: offer a free chapbook and see how big my platform, and what my social “reach” is!
Just do it.