A mindbending poem for Poetry Month, and a question answered

/ Monday, April 11th, 2011 / 6 Comments »

You could call this the soft announcement of my new homepage.

The question I’m answering is, why “Descent Into Light”? Well, because there have always been too many Mike Allens in the world, the phrase “Descent into Light,” snipped from my poem “Phase Shift,” has been the name of my author homepage since 2003, which came about when I checked out fellow poet Christina Sng’s Webpage and decide that, wow, I ought to have one of those, too.

Since then it’s gone through many permutations. The most recent version was wild to look at and had neat Flash features, but was incredibly cumbersome to update, which meant I almost never did it. People who looked at the page to see what I was up to (and who didn’t know to peek at my LiveJournal, “The Plasteel Spider Factory,” named after yet another snip from one of my poems) would look and assume I was out of commission, when the truth was more or less the opposite.

I’ve done most of my public online living on LiveJournal since late 2005 — but have been frustrated by recent connectivity problems, and the template I use there doesn’t really serve me well in terms of using it for a homepage. I need my page to be the pixellated equivalent of the long and elaborate presentation I have to do to explain to people what sort of writer and artist I am. After twenty years of going about everything in the most circuitous and impractical way possible, I don’t fit in any categorical boxes, really. So it’s hard to convey exactly what I do unless I can just lay all of it in front of you.

Which, at last, is what this completely new and hopefully much more active version of my old site does, thanks to WordPress. I haven’t yet figured out what its relationship will be to my LiveJournal, whether I’ll import that here or crosspost this there or what, as I can’t seem to get my LiveJournal to talk to anything at the moment except Twitter. I guess eventually I’ll figure it all out.

And while I leave that matter as a cliffhanger, I’ll end with this. I’ve had many potential publications not come to fruition over the years, but this particular one, a poetry postcard line that didn’t happen, at least left me with this beautiful image of my poem “Phase Shift,” originally from Tales of the Unanticipated, which I share with you now in honor of National Poetry Month. My thanks to artist Bob Freeman for giving my words some extra umph.

Phase Shift

6 Comments

  1. Jeff Minor says:

    Very nice words and image. It makes me think of a singularity, or entangled matter on a huge scale.

  2. Erzebet says:

    I *love* the new site design! And that poem is wonderful. Cheers!

  3. Ooooh! Great new sleek website! 🙂

    And GMTA — after years of my own domain stagnation I am thinking of converting my own personal site to WordPress too… Starting a new life and all…

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