Message in a bottle (!)

Here I am, quietly minding my own business (stop it! I am!), and land here:

Pursuing the Intersections: How to Be Published; How to Be Real // Ruminate Magazine

which begins with the quote 

“Being published is being published. Being a real poet is being a real poet. Sometimes they intersect.” Deborah Keenan

and later includes

So what does it mean to be a “real poet”— a real writer? If publication doesn’t turn out to tell me anything essential about myself or about my work, what standard am I pursuing?

That I tried? No.

That I feel good? Certainly not.

That it was hard? Nope.

Then I see that I’m not alone in my fretful obsessing

Part of the trouble with real is there’s no authenticity without contact with shit. […]

So what’s the dirt of writing? How do we know the real filmmaker, the real graphic designer, the real poet when our media [how has that word come to connote mostly the virtual?] isn’t physical in the way of a potter’s or woodworker’s?
I wonder if it’s time: Do we know a real poet by how much time she spends in her craft?

Maybe so. Maybe indolent time is the poet’s feedstock. And I am on a proper path after all. 

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