A Sunday Poems update

As hopefully you know, I released a little book of the poems that I have been posting here on the blog on Sundays.

Today Motherboard did a little piece on it:

I think next time I should make a game that has the poems in it, and I bet it would be seen by a much larger audience. Why should these things be tied down into traditional media and release methods? Why couldn’t we commingle them much more? If you were doing the game adaptation of that poem about network optimization, what the heck would that be?

Of course, it also got plenty of exposure from BoingBoing’s feature on it, which included several of the poems and illustrations. Gaming sites like Massively Overpowered and The Ultima Codex wrote about it too. All of this coverage is quite out of the ordinary for poetry, I suspect, which mostly gets covered by sites about poetry.

There was some of that too, such as this example on Tribrach:

We could especially use more poems on  programming and game design and other important technological subjects from people who truly know them.  Good poems might be able to help the rest of us better understand our relationships to them.

That said, in my conversations with Tanya Allen at Tribrach, the thing that was most interesting to me was the ongoing stigma attached to self-publishing the book, when in games and music we have of course gotten so used to independent releases that there is no longer that whiff of “vanity publishing” around it.

Tarin Towers, whose blurb is on the back of the book, also wrote about it for her regular newsletter:

A few of the poems were “wow” good, and several more made me stare into space for a while as I read the book on my iPad, riding BART, and most of the ones that made me say either “wow” or “huh” were about travel in one sense or other of the word. The endnotes are terrific, and they let me know that some of the vivid descriptions were of made up-visits to real places, which I found inspirational. For instance, Raph designed what is apparently an important MUD (like a combination chat room and D&D game) in the history of online social interaction, called LegendMUD. One of the levels or whatever of LegendMUD was based on the jungle in Kipling’s Jungle Book. I did not know that when I read it; I thought I was reading a spooky and evocative series of meditations on life and death set in an actual jungle, because the imagery was sharp and so were the angles of the thoughts. The book, when it’s out, will be called Sunday Poems, and there are some interesting overlays of the worlds of writing English and of programming code that I have not run across before in my literary travels.

So, given all that, is it burning up the charts? Well, it peaked at #13 on the American Poetry charts at Amazon, and it was their “#3 hot pick” for a while. But no, it isn’t, and I didn’t really expect it to. It’s poetry, after all! I still found it a very worthwhile exercise, and am already well along on assembling essays off the website for transformation into new books.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, you can find Sunday Poems here:

Buy in paperback (Amazon)

Buy Kindle ebook edition

Buy Nook ebook edition