2022: Year of the Poem

I'm thinking about trying to publish a chapbook. I have a lot of poems that I posted online over the past 10 years, not realizing that this meant I can't submit them anywhere because they are technically "published." Since I started looking into getting stuff published in journals, none of my new poems have gotten to see the light of day because I have to keep them all super super secret in order to get them considered. So while I've made it my goal to make at least 100 submissions over the course of this year, I am also going to start looking into putting the un-submittable poems into a chapbook, shopping around for publishers, and self-publishing if I don't get any interest or can't find a good fit. For the last 10 years, I've marked certain poems as belonging to what I call the "Hypnagogia Mythos" because they are surreal and have a more narrative structure. Most of them are inspired by dreams. I'm thinking those will be the ones I will collect, and they include many of my favorites (like Silk and A History) that I have been very sad about being unable to submit.

That said, I'm worried about the new poems. They've all been so poem-y lately. Boring, navel-gazey shit about nature and mortality. I'm happy with the language, but I am afraid nobody will care.