Caveat: Book of Caveat: Poem

I’ve mentioned this to a few people, but here it comes more “officially.”

I’ve decided to publish my daily poems.

At first, I was going to publish some kind of collection, but on reflection, I’ve decided it’s both easier and more gratifying to just publish all of them, and quality be damned. In today’s publishing environment, where anyone can publish anything, I still think I meet higher criteria than many.

I’ll have “Volume 1: Mostly in Korea” on Amazon in a few days. Meanwhile, I’m asking for last-minute feedback regarding the manuscript. Below is a “cut-and-paste” of the introduction, and the full .PDF manuscript is available here (link).

In 2016, I began writing a poem every day. Prior to that, and back to my adolescence, I had written poetry occasionally. In 2004 I had started a blog (caveatdumptruck.com); a brush with cancer in 2013 rearranged my hopes and dreams. Those factors induced new efforts at creative writing. A friend of mine had noticed a few of my poems on that daily blog, and had given me positive feedback. In particular, he liked my poems in the “nonnet” form, and so he off-handedly challenged me to write one every day. Or perhaps I challenged myself, while in conversation with him – I don’t actually recall.

By the end of 2016 I was reliably publishing a “daily poem” on my blog, and I have done so ever since without fail. Many of these poems aren’t so great – when you hold yourself to such a pace of production, quality inevitably suffers. Most of them are quite short – I often will just slap together something I call a “pseudo-haiku” if time is short or I feel uninspired.

Over a long period, however, quality seems to emerge from the quantity. My first impulse was to try to put together a “selection” of these daily blog-poems for publication, but the more I thought about it, the more I reached the conclusion that in today’s internet-mediated literary environment, this served no practical purpose. Given how the technology and business of publishing work nowadays, nothing is to prevent me from first publishing my “Collected Works” (as grandiose as that feels) and then only later publishing whatever selections or excerpts I might choose. In fact, all the poems here are already published, anyway – just in “blog” form.

These poems often reflect the moment of life that I am in at the moment of writing. Through the first two years, I was living in South Korea and working as a teacher. The poetry reflects that lifestyle. Then I moved to rural Alaska, and so subsequent poems reflect that quite different lifestyle. Throughout, my various interests emerge: philosophy, nature, literature, Zen Buddhism. My prior life as a student of Spanish Literature also shows up – a number of these poems are in Spanish. I only occasionally offer translations, and ask readers to bear with this linguistic eccentricity. Although my Korean fluency never equaled that of my Spanish, I have thrown in lines of Korean here and there, too – also with only haphazard translation.

This collection is titled “Caveat: Poem” after the typical heading used in my blog (where from the start, in 2004, all entries begin with the word “Caveat:”). When I started numbering my poems, I somewhat arbitrarily and retroactively numbered them back through the blog to around 2009. However, all but the first thirty or so poems are from a daily poem-writing habit that can be precisely dated to having begun on August 12, 2016.

For convenience, I have divided this collection into two volumes, based on my time living in Korea (“Volume 1: Mostly in Korea”) and my time living in Alaska (“Volume 2: Mostly in Alaska”). Given that my daily poem-writing activity continues, I expect more volumes in the future.

In the blog, I have the habit of remarking on the intended genre of the poem afterward, and I have retained those remarks. Occasionally, these genre descriptions included other information about the context or background of the poem. Sometimes I have included these. However, where I feel they cross too far over into autobiography or aimless rambling, I have deleted them. Regardless, please forgive the no doubt sometimes obscure nature of the referents of these poems – in the blog, the context is often more clear because the poems are juxtaposed with other events in my day-to-day life, not to mention pictures, photographs, travelogues, etc.

I’ve also had to compose a “blurb” for this book – the text that appears on the back of the book and also on the Amazon website. Here is my current draft of that:

While living in South Korea between 2007 and 2018, the author maintained a daily internet blog. After surviving cancer in 2013, he returned to an interest in poetry, occasionally publishing poems in that online medium. By the 2016, he was publishing a daily poem, a habit which has continued ever since, including through his relocation to Southeast Alaska in 2018.

​This first volume of poems includes those poems written while living in South Korea. Most are quite short, but the poems come in a variety of forms from traditional sonnets and Welsh-style englyns to free verse and what are termed “pseudo-haiku.” Themes range from daily life as an English teacher in South Korea through interests in philosophy, language, culture, storytelling and myth. Observations of the natural world often predominate. As a half-hearted practicing Buddhist, the author often attempts to craft poems that look at the world through a “zen-like” lens. Though a native English speaker, the poet occasionally writes poems in Spanish (having studied Spanish Literature in graduate school) and he has even thrown in fragments of Korean.

So I’m interested in hearing any feedback on content or format – let me know, via comments, here, or via email.