Welcome to Open Link Night here at dVerse Poets Pub. I’m Joe Hesch and I’ll be you’re virtual maitre d‘, bartender, and busboy for tonight’s get-together. Today’s special, as always, is Poetry, and you’re each the chef, the vintner, the moonshiner and patron. We are strange sort of farmer’s market-cum-ginmill of art around here.

I’m writing this intro flat on my back on January 31, my fourth day of flu-forced bed rest, so please bear with any off-the-rails incoherence. Of course, with the way I write, many may not notice the difference.

I looked back at the initial paragraph of today’s OLN introduction and noticed all the many roles we play, as poets and writers in this modern world of instantaneous dissemination of our work. Heck, we can even be our own publishers of we can find the time between the inspiration gathering, drafting, polishing, posting, and social media sharing. Oh, yeah, I forgot about all that mucky real life stuff, too.

I pondered how it used to be–before all this Internety stuff–how it used to be for a poet. The front end of the process was essentially the same. Humans have always had an infinite capacity to dive deep within, as well as temporarily leave their mortal husks, to find and interpret the physical and emotional of their own worlds.

And in most cases, they would inscribe their thoughts and impressions into something horrible or beautiful, or any flavor in between, couplets and verses, sonnets and odes, brilliantly rhymed and viscerally ragged pen-on-paper expressions of self they called poetry.

And that was that.

Oh, some would share them with loved ones in letters or in readings in front of the fire some winter night. Others would be brave or crazy enough to send them to some journal in the hope that an editor might think as well of their efforts as Mum and Auntie Anita did and publish them. Even fewer would gather their treasured poems and post them to one of the not-very-many publishers of verse in hope of sharing their work on a grand scale. And some, like Walt Whitman, would do it all himself.

With the advent of the Internet age, we have all become our own Whitmans, I guess. Which is why, I believe, old Walt is perhaps the patron saint of we who gather here tonight to share our poems with a few friends and, potentially, a whole universe of readers.

Maybe we’re not so different from our poetic forebears after all. We many writers of verse and prose just have a more direct route to the world. Despite all the numbers of people plying this life or avocation, we are very lucky to be living and writing in such times, my friends.

Now, enough of my fevered rambling. What’ll ya have and whaddaya bringing to the market tonight, poet? Here’s how you can share:

• Link in your OLN poem – one per blog, please – by clicking on the Mr.Linky button just below and cutting and pasting in your link.
• Don’t forget to let your readers know where you’re linking up and encourage them to participate by including a link to dVerse in your blog post.
• Visit as many other poems as you like, commenting as you see fit. This is where you get to express yourself about this poet’s work.
• Spread the word about our work. Feel free to tweet and share on the social media of your choice.