Good to know

Recently, when I was griping about the fact that I could not find a place to read more than one poem at a time in public, Marly asked whether I was sending things out to the places on the writer's listserve she told me about. I told her yes, that I do that, every once in a while, usually sending individual poems to contests or calls to submission.
A week or two ago, I responded to one of these that wanted visiting readers for a writer's conference at DePaul University. It's a long way to go to do a reading, but I figured that if I won the contest, they'd pay my way, and it would be fun. So I entered. The contest invited people to send poems, even if they had been accepted for publication, so I sent "The World is a Sound," the music poem I put up here a while back.
I didn't win the contest, but the person who wrote to me said that it was close. The poem was his personal favorite, and he argued hard, but ultimately lost. He invited me to come, which I cannot do, but I thanked him and told him not to give up hope. In a year or so, maybe there will be a book, and he or someone there can invite me to the campus as a reader and pay my way out.