Thank You For Reading

A mission statement

I’m celebrating two milestones with this edition of “Poetic Musings.” For one, I’ve reached what I’m calling the one-year birthday of the Musings, given that my plan was to post weekly, and my last post was #52. For another, I’ve recently seen a modest number of new subscribers who are not friends and family. In other words, thanks to the networking effect within Substack, readers are finding their way to me. I’m happy to have you along for the ride.

Because of these two achievements, it seems as good a time as any for me to step back and give all of you a clear idea of my goals with each and every post. Whether you’re a friend who’s likely to read anyway or a new subscriber drawn in by a recent post, your time is valuable, so I want you to know what you can expect for Year 2 and beyond.

I launched Poetic Musings as a way to communicate with a small group of poetry lovers which was just beginning to come together in person to read poems together and talk about why we liked them and where we felt we needed greater clarity. For reasons which perhaps I’ll explore in a future post, I’ve never taken to social media, but as I learned a little about Substack, and then saw how easy it was to create a visually interesting post, complete with embedded video links, I figured this might just be the way for me to write at greater length than the typical social media post, and in a place, unlike a group email, that would be available to the world at large. Not that I expected the world to notice, but I can dream can’t I?

What the Musings has evolved to become is a place where I can call your attention to happenings in the world of arts and culture. I’ve written about poetry, yes, but also about literature, movies, television, sports, classical music, opera, jazz, theater, the visual arts, and more. What I try to do with each Musing is imagine a reader who may not feel an affinity towards whatever I’m talking about, and then expose them to something which might just capture their interest. I make my home in Eastern Massachusetts, and will occasionally talk about something happening in my neighborhood, but with supplementary material such that you can be anywhere and still find something enlightening in the post. What I can promise you going forward is more of the same: a roughly once-a-week post, that will take you 3-4 minutes to read (although if you explore the links and videos, your time with me may vary), offered to you for free, now and forever, calling to your attention wonderful artistic and cultural output, no matter the medium. If you let me, I promise to expand your artistic horizons.

Perhaps your takeaway from this post will be the idea that you too can be a content creator. If you enjoy writing and want to do so for an audience, try creating your own Substack. You too can enjoy the thrill of seeing, via Substack stats, that you have readers, no matter how modest the numbers.