Risky Essays

I have so much negativity about my writing and my poetry! I persuade myself that I can neither sell my self-published books nor give them away. So, creating them seems futile. On the other hand, poetry has been my life--poetry and autoerotic pleasure. My autoeroticism is something I might share only as a drag dancer.  I have poems in which I imagine making pornographic videos of myself and selling foot selfies. But I don't have the courage to be a drag dancer--my family and my bashfulness prevent drag dancing from being an option for me, except in autoerotic fantasy. Drag dancing is normally for others, whereas autoeroticism by definition is for oneself. Possibly someone will get off on watching me watch myself drag dance, but my dancing is really only for my own pleasure. Every day when I take a walk in cutoffs and sandals, I'm my own delighted drag audience. I don't need others to appreciate me to enjoy myself. When I perform my poetry (rarely) and music, I wear the same ...

I want to ask whether poetry has been a vocation for me, as I do believe that I was called to write. At the age of fourteen, after receiving the Signet Keats for Christmas, I consciously and deliberately dedicated my life to poetry. I figured that, if I died at twenty-six as Keats did, I would have had enough time to write what I had to write. I'm now seventy-three, and I've written a lot, but maybe not as much as Keats. I have written many hundreds of poems and assembled most of those I haven't discarded or lost into about twenty printed collections.  Because I've written a lot and I like what I've written, I can say that poetry has been a successful  calling  for me.  However, if vocation implies the professional cred due to a poetry teacher or a published author, my devotion to poetry can only be called amateur . I've written because I love writing, not because it gains me money or tenure or any other kind of status. I have never wanted to submit for public...