One-year Anniversary

One year of poetry dispatches!

Dear readers,

One year ago today, I created Dispatches from the Basement with the help of friends who had been encouraging me for months to do it, but I didn’t believe them when they said people would be interested in a weekly poetry publication.

I chose to keep it simple: a picture and a poem. That’s it. No hot takes and no news beyond the kind of news best described by William Carlos Williams in his great poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”:

 It is difficult
to get the news from poems
                        yet men die miserably every day
                                                for lack
of what is found there.

To my surprise, a steady stream of people subscribed within days of making the newsletter public. I was able to pay bills and take care of necessities thanks to poetry, an art form that is typically thankless. Comments on the work I’ve shared are often generous, smart, and heartfelt; and I am grateful to all of you who’ve stuck around as the newsletter evolves.

Dispatches from the Basement has consistently grown since its inception. Recently, I was interviewed on The Megyn Kelly Show, and thanks to Megyn’s enthusiastic endorsement I gained a flood of new subscribers.

Nearly four years ago, I thought my life in poetry was over. Now I have an audience far larger and wide-ranging than what I had when I was “successful” and embraced by a poetry establishment that has since turned its back on me.

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To my paid subscribers, thank you. You help keep the lights on. If you haven’t chosen a subscription plan, please consider it.

Or you can give Dispatches from the Basement as a gift to a loved one. Maybe your mom needs poetry in her life (Mother’s Day is on Sunday!)?

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So, what’s the real point in this? Why would someone want poetry in their inbox?

Poetry clears the culture-war fog by unbinding language from an inhuman ideology. Language unbound, returned to the breath and the heart — the words we mumble in the dark to ourselves and each other as a means of spiritual survival — that’s poetry. And that is powerful.

With that declaration in mind, here’s to another year of weekly poetry dispatches!

Love,

Joseph