I think what I will do now is send out poems to magazines. I have a few new poems and I will send them out and wait to see if they are taken. If not, I will send them to another magazine. While waiting, I may write one or two more poems. Over time I will accumulate a pool of poems for sending out to magazines. After a time, I will probably publish these poems in one of my books, unless the poems are unimaginably popular, in which case somebody else can publish them.
I will do all this because Endi does this - the sending out to magazines - and I want us to do things together. She is much better and more diligent poet than I am, so I will send to magazines that she has painstakingly vetted and culled from the literary maelstrom.
I have said what I will do, and I will not do anything else. I will not read the magazines I am sending too. I will not give readings. I will not talk about my writing when I meet other poets, unless they ask, and they never do. They think all I really care about these days is my family and religion, and they are right.
But I do care about poetry and other art-making activities for what they can do to relate truth and beauty, and to bring us closer together. Writing poems and sending them out and generally behaving like a normal poet because your wife does so seems like a reasonable, pleasant, positive activity.
Don't you agree?
