“Glad to hear it's coming along for you. Any plans on becoming Poet Laureate? I'd imagine after your present position, anything else would be a major letdown. HaHaHa!” ---Mark SiglerWell, cats and kiddies, The Second Annual Great Free-For-All was truly a smashing success! Now in case you don’t know what I am referring to, dear readers, between midnight Monday morning, May 1 to midnight Tuesday morning May 2, Poetry Superhighway website creator Rick Lupert made 75 e-poetry books available to download for free within a 24 hour period.
Throughout the month of April, Lupert collected these e-poetry books and near deadline time, he had 57 e-poetry books donated. As the time grew nearer, I decided to partake in the great e-experiment, but I had never created an e-book before, let alone ever understand what a PDF file was, but thanks in part to Lupert’s posted instructions on how to make a book, it seemed as easy as pie.
But I thought which book I would choose and what poems would I use, were the real questions at hand. So I thought for a minute or two and decided to rely on old faithful and used my first & only poetry chapbook, “Shortness Of Breath.” The original hardbound chapbook was 20 poems in length and had a pink front and back cover. The front cover had an illustration of a flower with a rabbit face, illustrated by my good friend, Suzanne Hirsley.
As I stated earlier, making the e-poetry book was simple to create, as all I needed to do was to re-type of the poems, all the original and new booklet information, pick a format and I was set to go!
Not knowing exactly how to format photographs and also realizing I was pushing up too close to the e-book deadline, I decided to forgo the photos and just did a straight type, using “chiller” font. It took me an hour and a half to put everything together before I emailed it off to Lupert early Sunday morning, five minutes after midnight.
When I awoke much later that morning, much to my surprise, an additional 18 e-poetry books (including mine) had been submitted, totalling out to 75 e-poetry books.
Yesterday, before I left for work, I must have emailed over 70 people the link where to download the book, plus I posted the link on the Chicago version of Craigslist, but for some unknown reason it was flagged and removed.
When I came home yesterday afternoon, I checked my email and saw I had at least eight responses regarding my e-poetry book, mostly from friends who said things like “thanks,” “congratulations” and even my good pal Srdjan from Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia downloaded my book and promised to read it during the summer; I found it very amusing as I know he’s not an avid poetry reader, yet was thrilled nonetheless!
During the 24 hour period, I too, downloaded approximately 38 e-poetry books too, my favorite being by Jim Bennett, called “Elvis In Liverpool.” I too will make time soon to read all of those e-poetry books and perhaps review them here on my blog.
This morning, Lupert posted a list on his website of how many times each e-poetry book was downloaded. Although there was no official Top Ten List of the most downloads per e-poetry book, according to his list, my book was downloaded a total of 37 times, which came to being number eight out of 75 e-poetry books, which isn’t bad at all. Just think of it this way, 1 & 7/12 per loaded book per hour.
Yes, my dear friends I am tooting my horn on this one, but I deserve to be proud every now and again, don’t I?
For those of you who didn’t get to a chance to download my e-poetry book or would like a copy for yourself, email me in care of this blog (see blog profile for email address) and I’ll be sure that you receive one. You’ll also make me darned happy too!
Thanks to Rick Lupert for making this e-poetry book experiment a positive experience for me and the other poets who participated. Here’s to 2007!
