My poetry world received a bombshell this past week as I went to confront my reluctance to get my poems published officially, to send several into journals and magazines to see how they would be received in the professional poetry community.

Except, it turns out that posting them here counts as publishing. None of the journals I want to which I want to submit will take any of the poems I’ve posted here in my poetry blog.

Tough noogies, Jaybraham.

Aside from that, I found that the professional poetry rate of payment is $1 per line. The poem I posted here would only get me $32. Many of my poems would be $10 or less, about the cost of a dozen eggs.

And that’s not mentioning that the response time for poems is several months, in some cases half a year or more.

I’m not sad about this, nor mad, just disappointed.

On the other hand, it has gotten me thinking about other ways to become a professional poet of at least slight renown. I am musing over these ideas and hopefully in the next month I’ll have a plan.

The thought that I would give up on my blog, though, to wait several months and possibly have my poem accepted for a future publishing date, finally receiving a check for $20 minus taxes, well, I’m not going to do that.

I’ll detail my thoughts later though.

For now, I want to talk about this poem, “because^u”.

I gave up fighting myself on this one, trying to steer it away from the lyricism and the sentiment, trying not to say something so simple as “my world is/mostly livable because/you and I are friends.”

There is nothing cryptic or profound there. And the poem, I’m fairly certain, would quickly be rejected at any of the publications to which I thought to submit.

That might have been the undercurrent of my writing today, the refusal to steer away from being seen as trite.

I had many people in mind as I wrote this, thinking also that people in my family are also my friends, even though the preference is to think of “family and friends” not just friends.

So I could have written “friends”, but no, in my head I saw this as a greeting card poem, of sorts. Longer and more complex is some ways, at least in the line lengths and lack of end-rhyme, but overall I wanted something you could print and had to someone.

That meant I needed to be non-specific, so nothing about that time we had at the beach nor that first time we met.

I had a lot more rhyme in the poem originally–“wise” became “wishful” in the third line. “Set” became “made” for the alarms.

I am using the word “regiment” where the correct term is probably “regimen” or “regimentation”. Having looked at it, I like the contrast with the “sop-filled words” phrase, the contrast between militarization and being soppy or overly sentimental.

There is also the concept of SOP or Standard Operating Procedure as an interpretation of this phrase, which ties into the word regiment and regimen and is essentially the way that the narrator talks about their day, as if there is a standard path through which she navigates life.

Ok, now that I’ve realized this, I’ve just changed the title of the poem from “because^u” to “sop”.

I was tempted to call it “what’s sop” or “what’sop”, but no, that’s a lie, it’s not really tempting now that I see it written down. Yuch.

Writing these reactions to my poetry gives me the chance to have a conversation with myself and gives me a lot of insight into what I’ve created.

I think that doing this is pretty unique, and I know that if you simply read my poem in a journal I couldn’t possibly provide anything like this.

Cool. I like discovering ways that this format can offer more than the traditional path of a poet.

I took the picture here just this morning, out with the dogs playing in the yard while sleet fell and ice formed on every surface. It’s a what’sop day.

I’ll end here with an AI interpretation of this poem.

Lots of images of people in beds. I hope there is more in my poem than that.

So things are going to change for my small blog. I hope you’ll stick with me.