Oh, Happy Day!

It's not all "doom and gloom" for poets, after all...

Warning: This is a shameless “brag alert” although it may offer hope to other writers, poets and poetry lovers…

Considering that I wrote in virtual anonymity for three decades, my recent successes may be proof that perseverance pays off:

• I just passed 60 million views on Quora, most of them in the last two years.

  • I’m averaging 2 million views per month, and the rate keeps increasing.

  • I have nearly 11,000 followers on Quora.

  • I have over 430,000 upvotes on Quora.

• Combined with my website, The Hypertexts (www.thehypertexts.com), I have over 67 million views. And this doesn’t include many poems of mine that have gone viral, whose views I am unable to track. Since some of my poems have been republished by major newspapers and news services like the BBC, Daily Kos, The Hindu (1.4 million daily copies), The Telegraph, etc., I suspect the total views are over 100 million. And probably way more than that.

• Most shocking of all, my name has shown up a number of times in Google searches for “world’s greatest poets” and “world’s best poets.” This has been confirmed by eight different users in the US and one in the UK. I will be the first to say this doesn’t mean I belong, but it does mean that I have reached enough readers to at least be on Google’s radar screen. None of the other 50 names being returned are “crazy wrong” if Google is measuring popularity with readers, which I suspect it is, rather than mere critical acclaim.

• Another thing I’m (probably inordinately) proud of, is having had 74 poems set to music by composers, from swamp blues, to country, to progressive rock, to opera. Composers are looking for musical lyrics, so to be singled out 74 times by 35 composers seems like a very nice form of validation by “people in the know.”

In any case, it’s not all “doom and gloom” for poets.

Oh, happy day!