Some news!

"Life is poetry / and poetry is life..."

Dear friends,

Dispatches from the Basement was featured in yesterday’s edition of Substack Reads. Greetings to the many new readers who found me, and who are still finding me, through that post!

I also wanted to point you toward a recent review of my book, Rosary Made of Air.

“A spare book of even sparer poems, Massey has a remarkable gift for expressing in words the sound and light of the world around him, especially the natural or solitary, and incorporates elements of the sacred with incredible subtlety.”

Reviews are hard to come by when you’re operating, as I am, outside of the poetry world or as the poet Charles Bernstein refers to it: Official Verse Culture.

To know my book is being read, heard, and responded to is a blessing. I self-published it with no expectations and the book has reached thousands so far, a fact that fills me with gratitude and hope.

Readers like you make the dream possible.

---

Poetry is not an art form that belongs behind a cage in the depths of academia. For too long, poetry has been held hostage in an exclusive domain of theory-addled hot air.

Poetry must breathe!

As my late mentor Cid Corman put it:

The Call

Life is poetry
and poetry is life — O
awaken — people!

---

In the coming weeks and months, you’ll see a few different things here other than the usual weekly poem. There will be occasional bursts of prose, discussions about some of my favorite poems, and notes about what I’ve been reading.

Let me know what you’d like to see or hear (there is a podcasting feature on Substack!). Feel free to drop a comment below.

---

I’ll leave you, for now, with a poem:

Thank you for supporting me on this journey.