Read my latest story, "A Tale of Two Birthdays", at 52|250.

While I’ve written before about identifying as a minor poet, my ambitions for my poems remain obscenely high. This is not to say that I have grandiose notions for what my work might cover or produce; I am content to remain a poet of cracks, niches, shards, and little white flowers that occasionally reveal teeth yet refuse to devour people any way but whole. What I mean is that I of course want my poems to be read by as many people as possible.

I say of course because if you believe in the value of your work, it only makes sense that you should actively put it out there. This is true even if the value you perceive is small: full daylight requires many wavicles. Why would you hide even the smallest fragment of sunlight?

The difference between ambition for oneself and ambition for one’s poems may seem slim. To me it is the difference between being driven to compromise for the sake of publicity, publication, or what have you and being unable to do so.

Still, I sign my work. Why? I don’t feel the need to prove the nature of my ambitions to anyone (why write about them then? because I think they are a decent set of ambitions and would like to see [if] other poets share them). More importantly, I want to take responsibility for my words, though I realize that other people have reasons for keeping their identities hidden and am sure that given the right set of circumstances I would do so as well.

Then again, maybe I’m just a madly ambitious egotist who isn’t very good at playing networking games and has created a theoretical position to give herself some sort of moral high ground.

But would I give it away if I were?

Then again, wouldn’t that be the perfect cover?

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