CONFESSION, FABLE, or SHORT STORY?
………………………………………………………………. …. …..July 19th, 2020
“The last two threads have occupied me almost compulsively for over six months, and in the process made me realize that I needed to be more forthright. And now five weeks later whatever it is has started to grow roots and the roots green sprouts — and even if it achieves nothing it’s still greening something in me bit by bit.“Last night I woke up with a word* and, not knowing what it meant, scribbled it out in the dark on the scrap of paper marking “The Invisible Woman” that was lying beside me. I copied the last letters of the word twice so I might be able to decipher it in the morning.
“The previous thread, “For Those Like Galileo,” concentrates on Part II of GALILEO’S SECRET in which the “secret” actually appears, though like me at the time you might not have been able to make out quite what it was, and this dream-word is a clue if not an actual cue in every sense of the word!
“The thread before that, “In Praise of the Still Unweighed: Off the Record at Eighty,” was begun at the end of November, 2019, getting ready for my 80th birthday coming up on December 7th. The critical parts explore the struggle to develop a voice of my own starting at the age of 50, while the “off-the-record” parts examine the specific problems I have had getting my work recognized from 1990 to the present — in other words, a whole additional lifetime in which to get born in the second half of a single life.”
…..C.W.
I thought my time had come in 2010 when I was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by one of the best poetry journals in America, but just the opposite happened. In the 12 years that have followed not one of my poems has been accepted even by journals that had already published me or had been giving me regular encouragement up to that point. And now I have given up sending out individual poems altogether — which is how my 3 books got finished. “Under a hiatus of ash,” I say to myself.
Or was it rain?
…………*…………….*……………*…………….*.
…………………………………………………………….. …..////////………updated May 12th, 2022
And here’s what’s left of this ‘Forthright Appeal’ (if you’ve visited this page before you will see that I have now deleted most of it...).
As a start I’d like editors today to read some of my poetry as did James Laughlin, Theodore Weiss, Marvin Malone, Alice Quinn, Marilyn Hacker, Joseph Parisi, David Young, Lee Sharkey, Dan Veech, Ronald Wallace, and Susan Terris, among the many distinguished editors who published my work and/or reached out to help me 10, 15, 20 years ago, an unknown poet with no degrees or affiliations.
I sent “Connemara Trousers” to The New Yorker, one of my earliest submissions. Alice Quinn wrote back right away. “Much too long for us,” she said, ” — try The Kenyon Review.” And Marilyn Hacker replied almost immediately:
……….. “Yes!”
……………………… [Can you imagine? Just click on it and see!]
And just a few years later Theodore Weiss short-listed a very early version of my GALILEO’S SECRET for the QRL just before ill-health forced him to retire after editing the famous series for 50 years. Wiki says; “Ted Weiss showcased emerging and major writers including William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, e. e. Cummings, Thomas Merton, Mark Van Doren, Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and also introduced some that were not widely known to Americans, including Franz Kafka and Eugenio Montale.”
I still have the little scraps of note-pad paper on which Ted Weiss encouraged me with his stubby pencil. Among my most precious relics, his precious words were safely conveyed to me all the way to Chiang Mai in the safe hands of Renée Weiss!
I share my even earlier correspondence with James Laughlin with the Houghton Library at Harvard, but I think my hard copy is probably the top one he stripped off his old Remington to mail to me in person. I didn’t even have a book to show him at the time, just individual poems which he liked enough to write a lot to me, and to share with me his own struggles too as I am sharing mine with you.
…………./……………………………….‘Dona nobis pacem,’
……………………………………………………………Christopher.
……………….*RECEPTACLE:
……………………….1. Object: A container that holds items or matter;
……………………….2. Botany: The expanded tip of a flower stalk or axis
…………………………..that bears the floral parts or the florets of the
…………………………..flower head;
……………………….3. Electronics : A fitting connected to a power supply
…………………………..equipped to receive a plug;
……………………….4. Poetry: A supra-dimensional quantum or ‘ravish-
…………………………..ment’ as contemplated in a spontaneous
…………………………. celestial observation.
….………………
[To exit you can either move on to the next MAJOR THREAD, FOR THOSE LIKE
GALILEO (February 6, 2020), or chose another Thread from the Index in the left
hand margin.]
THE DISCUSSION CONTINUES IN THE COMMENTS
Cowpattyhammer 
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