Your poetry really impresses me, not least in the sheer volume of work you produce. If you don't do it regularly (I know you said you have before) you should submit this stuff for publication. If I was editing a literary mag I would be all over this stuff.
Not to criticize your choices here, but self-publishing is something I have a strong opinion about. The way I'd basically lay it out is this: your work is good enough to be published by a professional publication, so why do all the work yourself? You're a writer -- writers get paid to write, if they're good. Self-publishing has kind of a bad name (deservedly in most cases, I would say) because it is something that anyone can get in on. No matter how bad your stuff is, you can publish it if you want to. I always hate to see talented people go down that road, because they could get far more respect for their work if they went through the traditional channels. I'm not a traditionalist by any stretch, but in this case the traditional way seems best: if your writing is good, people will pay you to allow them to print it (ignoring here the fact that no system is perfect and the publishing industry fucks over a lot of talented people). This is assuming, of course, that you have no serious interest in the publishing business, and would just be self-publishing as a way of getting your work out there. If that's not the case, ignore that rant. In the music industry there are a lot of small labels -- if you make good music, you're almost guaranteed to get signed by one if you keep at it. It may not be EMI, but it's still a company dedicated to getting your work out there. Same with publishing. It may not be Random House or The New Yorker, but there are a lot of small presses out there that work very hard to publish talented authors who may have been largely overlooked. Something to think about is all
