I hate to admit it, but I'm very excited about getting the poem into the textbook. Three different versions of the textbook will be published, two in edititons of 38,000, each, the other in an edition of 30,000. That should get it a lot of exposure. Let's say one in ten persons buying the book does more than glance at my poem, and one in a hundred likes it enough to investigate my oeuvre. If just one or two of the latter comes to write influentially about my oeuvre, I'll be made, right?

I know. This kind of thing has happened to me several times before, without any noticeable effect. (I had a play in the final round of a fairly important contest twenty years ago; I had a director attached to a fairly prominent theatre in San Francisco (but who turned out to be a flake) interested enough in a play I sent the theatre to phone me about it twenty years ago; I got into the Gale Contemporary Writers' Autobiography Series ten years ago; I got a poem in a history of Factsheet Five published by Penguin--after being a columnist for the magazine around fifteen years ago; I even thought becoming a regular columnist more than ten years ago for Small Press Review would do something for me. Then there's this blog, which I really would make the world take notice when I started it a year-and-a-half ago. (Hey, I'm getting an average of two more readers a day than I had a year ago, and some entries I get twenty visits!) Still, the odds that someone who might be able denull my career as a poet will be better once the book is published. Aside from that, to where other than his daydreams can a serious artist go to for encouragement?