So Ya Think Yer A Poet, Do Ya?

Little known fact:

I started off my meager career as a writer as a poet.

Yeah, dead serious.

Sure, I’m like every other writer out there who says that they knew when they were a teenager that they wanted to be a writer.

And when I was a fifteen I was fairly convinced that I wasn’t suited for any type of work other than sitting in front of a typewriter all day making shit up.

I even have a clutch of badly written Stephen King and David J. Schow pastiche to prove it. (By the way, not a chance in hell anyone other than my closets family members—i.e., my wife—is ever going to read those beyond explicit dribblings.)

But like most writers, I really didn’t start getting into the craft until my early twenties and the form I experimented with the most was poetry.

I have reams of the stuff tucked away in manila folders and tattered spiral notebooks.

The question is was any of it good?

Well, some people thought it was okay enough to publish.

Xeroxed broad sheets and hand stapled zines like cokefish and helpp (still don’t know what the extra P was for?) loved my poems(I was originally going to print something from those old pubs when I first started planning this post, but right now the Rawson clan is living out of boxes due to our recent move and to be honest with you, I don’t even know where to start looking.) and I loved poetry so much that I ran weekly readings at Macy’s coffee house up in Flagstaff, AZ for six months.

Needless to say I thought I was hot shit.

Of course, when you’re young and idealistic you don’t realize that what you write is the shit.

It is SHIT.

Straight up runny cow flop.

No, it really wasn’t that bad, but it was heavy on the Bukowski and Frank O’Hara influence.

Yup, working class surrealism.

By the time I left dreary soot gray Flagstaff for the oven baked desert flats of Phoenix, I’d pretty much grown out of poetry (or at least I thought I had) and started driving myself towards writing prose and dabbling in visual art forms. (oil painting—BTW, if anyone ever want to see those efforts, I have a garage full of them for you to look at. There was a three year period where I painted every day without fail.)

But even those forms faded to black when I fooled myself into thinking that I could be content with a life in a cubicle where I didn’t create anything other than profits for whatever mega corporation I was working for.

I managed to keep this self deception for four long, video game addled years until my daughter Sadie was born.

And I don’t know if it was because of the lack of sleep or figuring out that spending countless hours playing Balder’s Gate was a huge waste of my fucking time and I started writing again.

But by this time, I’d discovered writers like Bruen, Stella, Starr, Gischler, Smith, Coleman, Zeltserman, Abbott, and that Polish guy from Philly.

And the form I returned to first:

Poetry.

But instead of working class surrealism, I churned out hard-boiled/noir poetry, which I then shaped into short stories.

But about a year ago I thought to myself, self, you should just write a poem to write a poem, so I did and they weren’t half bad, so I sent a few of them out under the name C.K. Black (Another interesting only to me fact, the name C.K. Black derived from a short lived collaboration between myself and A Twist of Noir’s editor Christopher Grant. We wrote one flash piece together and it was published by Flash Fiction Offensive.) and surprisingly, the pieces got picked up by a few zines. Then I decided that the whole pseudonym thing was kind of stupid and just started sending them out under my name.

Which brings me around to the Lineup 4.

Wow, what freaking great collection to be apart of:

Bruen, Coleman, Corbett, Schwartz, plus cronies like Weddle (who, by the way, is a pretty damn talented poet) and Shea and a whole bunch of other talented whackos…

When Gerald and Reed told me my poem, “A Story To Tell Our Daughter” was in, 37 year-old me nodded and said,

“That’s righteous, thanks for including me.”

But the 21 year-old Keith—who still lives somewhere deep in my bowels where he spends most of his time chain smoking hand rolled cigarettes and pining for women who will never want him—was jumping around and pumping his fist in the air.

So go and buy this fucker over at Poetic Justice Press and make 21-year-old Keith and 37 year-old Keith happier then a pig in shit