J Mayhew and T Peterson on being a poet. took me maybe 2 years before I would admit to myself that I was a writer, that I wasn't just kidding myself. quite some while after that that I would offer that as what I did. especially with the assumption that the act aint real if you haven't published. the ugh question if ever one's being a writer leaks out: what sort of stuff do you write? the stuff that a person could read, I guess. to say poetry brings that loaded, self-indulgent image. my friends and I did a little publication in high school, and in doing so met a fellow who, as he declared, wrote at 3 o'clock. my friend credited this person's poems to Three O'Clock Brown. I rarely use the term poet on myself. it's more like an honorific, and a limitation. I write other than poetry. OR I am being profligate with the definition of poetry. whatever. my 1st publication was in This 3 in 1972, with Grenier, Creeley, Coolidge and, by gawd, the pre-comment box Curtis Faville!!!. my 2nd publication was in a broadside put out by Stephen Ellis's Oasis Press in 1999. he has published an enormous number of writers this way. he asked for 6 poems, printed 50 copies, kept one for archive purposes, and the rest were for me to distribute. of course I still have some. it is a tickle to publish in print, congrats to the Mayhews. it's evidence that you weren't joking when you said you were a writer. I think publishing online is still considered circumstantial evidence somehow. my grief with online simply sits with my inability to read off the screen for long. and I won't even tell you about the last time I read online work in the bathtub...