Shakespeare said it and so did a lot of other people in different ways. You need to be true to yourself.
For the last while, about a year, I’ve been trying to expunge or at least contain a part of me that I wasn’t getting a lot of positive feedback about. That’s my baseball versification. I like baseball and I like writing poems and ditties and songs about baseball and ballplayers. I’ve done this on a regular bases since 2002 and most of the people around me tolerated it as an eccentricity and never really talked about about it.
I found the filk community on rec.music.filk to be less than hospitable, though in person, filkers are gracious and will listen to baseball filk, too. But for the most part, I had the impression that I was burdening people when I wanted to share something with them.
Well, all that has changed. On first and third Tuesdays, I attend a writer’s group out here in Katy and we typically share what we’re working on. I had shown a poem of mine to an online friend who said it was very good so I took that and a revision of something I’d done before on Joe Jackson with me to the meeting. I also brought chapters of a book I’m working on. My idea was to let the group decide what to hear and they picked poetry.
I passed around the poetry and read them both and got a shock. No one wanted me to change a rhyme or add something or take something out. Instead, we talked about possible markets and marketing strategies.
I sat there, pretty much speechless, listening to people tell me how good my ditties are. And they wanted more. As part of the two marketing strategies, i should work on more poems about players as well as more of the “voices of baseball” set. I don’t think anyone has ever told me before that I should write *more* baseball stuff. It was a revelation, a confirmation and a validation.
So look out world, I’m about to write more baseball verse.
