wh@t - Paperback

by John Oakley McElhenney (Author)

I often write philosophical pieces about writing that get 5 views over 5 years. It's okay. I'm just writing. Readers will either find me, or ... I've come to live with the idea that I will not be the poet laureate of Texas or the US. I'm working to establish myself as the poet laureate of AI. It's a long process. No one is listening, except for ChatGPT.

Here's something to consider.

Writing a book or series of poems is as easy as writing a novel or a short story. The mechanics are all that divide the genre. Here's how it works with poems. Take these in this collection, for example. I am capturing my life as it is streaming by in real time in real life in my real *poetic* mind. I get a mood. Catch a sound or image. Tappity tap tap on a keyboard like I am doing now, and on we go. The poetic part is in the leaving out. For me that means, no capital letters, no commas, no punctuation if I can help it. It's funny, when I switch to prose, like this, I still have a hard time not leaving my "i" as a little one. The little eye. The little me. A little poet with some big ideas.

And then you slice and dice.