22nd Jul 2008
Shameful Self-Promotion, or I Couldn’t Make This Stuff Up
I am about to have my first traditional publication credit: two poems in an anthology. I would be lying to you if I said I wasn’t pretty jazzed about it, but the subject matter of the book — if only because it’s my first publication — is a little embarrassing.
The book is called Women. Period. Wanna guess what it’s about?
Why is it that our “time of the month” is taboo? In some cultures, menstruating women are banished from their marital beds during Aunt Flo’s visit.
In our culture we come up with cute names to talk about menstruation, mimic it in television commercials with something that looks like it could clean windows, and charge exorbitant prices for pressed cotton wrapped in something called Dry-Weave — to keep it away from us.
And yes, even though I see right through all these euphemisms and whitewashes, I am still embarrassed that I wrote two poems — one of which I even count among my best — about the subject. Worse yet, they’re not hiding away in a document on my now dead computer. They’re out there, in the world. In a book.
So it is with a familiar mix of pride and shame, and shame of my own shame — metashame? — that I announce this publication. Truly it’s a gift that I get to put something in my artist’s resume. Certainly it’s an honor to be chosen. And someday it will be a funny story.
For now, it’s mine. And damn it, I’m proud of it.
I am about to have my first traditional publication credit: two poems in an anthology. I would be lying to you if I said I wasn’t pretty jazzed about it, but the subject matter of the book — if only because it’s my first publication — is a little embarrassing.
The book is called Women. Period. Wanna guess what it’s about?
Why is it that our “time of the month” is taboo? In some cultures, menstruating women are banished from their marital beds during Aunt Flo’s visit.
In our culture we come up with cute names to talk about menstruation, mimic it in television commercials with something that looks like it could clean windows, and charge exorbitant prices for pressed cotton wrapped in something called Dry-Weave — to keep it away from us.
And yes, even though I see right through all these euphemisms and whitewashes, I am still embarrassed that I wrote two poems — one of which I even count among my best — about the subject. Worse yet, they’re not hiding away in a document on my now dead computer. They’re out there, in the world. In a book.
So it is with a familiar mix of pride and shame, and shame of my own shame — metashame? — that I announce this publication. Truly it’s a gift that I get to put something in my artist’s resume. Certainly it’s an honor to be chosen. And someday it will be a funny story.
For now, it’s mine. And damn it, I’m proud of it.
Posted by Rubesy under 
books, my work, poetry 
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