Everything In Its Right Place

Two Fridays from now I will go to New York for the release party of Rabbit Ears: Poems about Television. The book features a veritable "Who's Who" of American poetry, and somehow I'm in it too.

For most of the people in the anthology, it's probably not a huge deal. They're used to their names appearing in the same table of contents as one another. For me this is the greatest event of my life since 2011, when I was published in Gargoyle, long before moving to DC. Back then my name was still Benjamin C. Krause, and I was ashamed to let anyone know who I really was. But this time, I'm out and I'm close enough to the release party that I can travel there and back the same night.

So what do I do in the meantime? Make everything perfect, of course. It starts with mass-deleting videos off my YouTube channel. I can't let you see my receding hairline; you might wonder where it went and how my hair grew so fast. And besides, they're amateurish. Not like the videos I just recorded suddenly in the middle of the night to replace them- those are pure professionalism.

OK, then what? Well, my webpage kind of sucks. It could use some actual poems on it. Hey, why not put them in one of those Carousels? Those are trendy nowadays. Now spend all night working on the CSS, only to revert everything because you don't like how it turned out. There. Now you've got the same crappy site with a carousel of your poems. Congratulations.

But wait, there's more! We need a blog. And this blog has to be Informative. It has to be Worth Reading, which means it's of great necessity that it not involve you. Let's write a review of the first great poem we find on the Internet, and spend three quarters of the review insulting it. That'll show some edge.

Alright, now I've got some YouTube videos where I'm wearing so much lipstick that I look like a drag queen, a blog post that insults a great poem, and an arguably crappier webpage than where I started. What next? I bet you could come up with a million ways to sabotage your poetic and day-to-day living careers. Let's get brainstorming, Catherine. Or wait- is it possible that maybe- just maybe- you could slow down? Get some sleep, listen to some music, go for a walk? Meditate? Read some Charles Bukowski or Hugh Fox?

Wait, here's an idea: let's bring back Liebamour. Let's put out the Quincouplet Anthology. Let's do it all without staying up all night ever again. Let's keep our job. Is that too much to ask? We'll see.

Update: Rabbit Ears has been delayed indefinitely, due to the current publisher dropping it.