Shanna, I've not no quibble with your analysis of big publishing and no quarrel with your summary of the options for micro-publishing. When I made the comment that the small-press model poetry's followed for 70 years changes when you just add internet, I meant that I see your point. I take most of your points -- yes book reviewers are lazy and formulaic. Yes book review editors feel or imagine pressure not to talk about poetry. Yes we have no legitimation crisis.

My point is that if Dan Brown is a widget that can be pushed like a widget by pressing all the widget-need buttons, this need not be a bad situation for poetry. For starters, poets don't ask for big advances. A book breaks even at what, 400 copies?

No, the big companies and their lock on distribution, that's not the problem. The problem with poetry is that it there's too damn much of it for anybody to read. This is partly hear me when I say it a quality control problem. I'm not even talking about the truly bad poems, the hateful ones, or even those loveable dead animal poems.

And whatever people want to say about David's annuals, I know for a fact there are a couple hundred poems published every year that I'd be willing to show just about anybody and say "Hey I liked this one a lot." Are these lost Yeats poems? No, they're just all there. (Some of them are spacey, but they're all up in that spaciness.)

Right now my problem is with inert poems. Poems that float a half-cute line or semi-relatable experience, and are done. No crazy language no wiggly perception nothing unknown. Nobody needs poems that don't do anything. I get no culture ruboff, no actual sharing in someone else's experience, no insight, nothing.

Based on my reading, I'd estimate these inert compounds take up three-quarters to five-sixths of poetry publications. Most people would call that a generous estimate. I'm really not that harsh a reader. And I desperately don't want to give any poet what they used to call a complex.

I'm just not looking forward to telling the truth about this, which is that when a journal gets one out of three poems right, it's a keeper. That ratio should be more like three out of four. A few journals have made it there this year: Superflux, the Massachusetts Review, The Canary. And it's not the editors' fault, I know, I'm an editor. The poems come in, they are good enough to get all Winnicott about it, and voila, print.

What I'm saying is NOT: Edit, self-punish, work harder, strive, or please the great-withholder-in-the-sky. I'm saying, no more "I have three unpublished manuscripts." Make them one good manuscript and get it in the hands of somebody who loves it. How to do that: Get some friends you trust and let them tell you -- not what the good ones are or any other horrifying inhibiting complex-inducing phrase -- let them tell you which ones they liked the most, responded to, remember. Look at those. Work on them. The other ones, you don't have to file them in the trash, you liked them enough to put them in "the manuscript," you just didn't like them enough to put them in other people's heads. That's ok, it's not easy.

I've got to get some lunch.