Inevitable Weather

The ancient Chinese poet Han Shan used to write his poems on Cold Mountain and make little paper boats of them. He'd float them downstream and forget about them. Publishing poetry today is like that. The poems of a hundred thousand poets come out, then float downstream into limbo, never to be seen or heard from again.

This is my self-published manuscript that, along with the 10,000 to 12,000 other poetry manuscripts that are sent out every year, has been rejected by all the New York publishers and the thirty-or-so poetry contests that are held every year by university presses. Even these words, the ones you are reading now, are like Han Shan's poems: seen only by those who happen upon them by accident.

So here my poems are, courtesy of a fine press in Indiana, none of which are soggy from the gentle descent from my own Cold Mountain.