In the early 1980s, after 15 years of publishing reasonably subtle and technically elaborate lyric poems in magazines and books that no one read, I woke up one morning to the unpleasant truth that publishing my lyric poetry in the late twentieth century was equivalent to playing with my dick on a busy street corner--and having everyone ignore me. The insight was humiliating enough that I decided to stop publishing my verse and to stop giving public readings of it. I haven’t published a poem since, or at least I haven’t crossed the street to do so. A few years ago I let several friends print then-already written poems, but I did that without expecting to be paid or even have the poems acknowledged. I’ve been neither disappointed nor surprised: the publications and the non-publication met with the same response.

There was nothing tragic in this. Ceasing to publish verse didn’t profoundly affect the quality of my life, spiritual or otherwise. My heart didn’t break, the Muses didn’t torment my sleep, nor did I slip off my edge of the so-called real world because I stopped mumbling short-line sentences to small, close-to-comatose audiences. Actually, it was more like coming up with the right insight at the right time, even if the insight had been clubbing me over the head for years.

Some luck with technology made things easier for me. Word processors were becoming common around 1980, and I had enough money to buy one. When I stopped being a poet, I was able to make a relatively smooth transition to being a writer, one who produced big, long sentences that turned into paragraphs and pages of prose quite easily. Soon I was writing heavily revised books, some of it fiction, but more often the metaphor-laced philosophical speculations and cultural or political commentary that had always been my secret passion. I had a lot in my mind, and a lot on it. Ceasing to publish poems opened up the length, breadth and the depths of the world to write about, and I wrote energetically and often. For a decade, I continued to write verse in private, but in steadily decreasing quantities and with a gradual but relentless decay in the attentions that provoke occasional verse. I kept thinking about that street corner, I guess.

Several years after I stopped publishing verse, somewhere near the mid 1980s, I accepted an invitation from Ottawa trouble-maker and editor John Metcalf to write an essay for one of his critical anthologies about why I’d stopped publishing verse¹. I wrote 3000 words on my Apple II+ within a few hours of Metcalf’s invitation, then rethought and rejigged it fifteen or twenty times. Before long, I had a version of my street-corner trauma dressed up in the ideas that had been swirling around it, and I’d become a writer who, for the first time, felt productive rather than merely sensitive.