To book or not to book?

For the majority of my life I'd dreamed of being a published author. My ambitions throughout high school and most of college was to work on my writing to eventually be published. I wanted to have a tangible book to be able to put on a bookshelf someplace to gather dust. Since then I have come to question the idea of what it even means to become a published writer in an age of e-books and twitter's 180 character limits. Bloggers getting paid to do what they do without ever having to involve a large corporate entity's approval to put their words out there. What does it mean to even still want tangible books instead of an e-reader that has a whole library in it?

John Waters', a fellow Baltimorian, said it best: "We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck them"

I don't know if books will ever be able to be cool again in the way they once were. Having a new Android tablet often turns more heads than a bookshelf full of even the most amazing and wonderful books. Books may be a dying format like so many other analog media formats. On top of that where would I even go with a poetry manuscript to try and get someone to pay enough attention to publish it? I see a lot of small presses that are publishing poetry all over the place, but most of these places require a year long tour commitment to create the audience to buy the work. I'm still in the single digits as far as public performance goes. I want to be a poet, not a rock star. If I wanted to be a rock star I'd have joined a band.

I've been thinking a lot about how I'd like to pursue my ambitions to get my writing to an audience. I don't know how I'll go about it exactly. I just know that trying to get a collection of my work published isn't really something I want to do right now. I want to try to build on my performance. I need to spend more time reading my work aloud to get used to the sound of it. I need to stop hating the sound of my voice so much so I can record and learn from the way I read things. I accept that if I want to have a wider audience I need to work on my presentation.

I've been brain storming ideas. for what I may want to do. I think I want to try doing some recording of various places I enjoy and then record a poem over the audio of the footage. Maybe I can wrangle some of my other unemployed or empty scheduled friends to help out with it. It is a fledgling of an idea. It may work out better in my head than in execution, but who cares. It's something to keep busy with while I'm waiting for the next thing to come along and pay me to do something.