How Publishing My Lucid Moon Poetry Magazine Led to My Nervous Breakdown!

     In 2000 and 2001, I was harshly criticized by several colleagues who ganged up on me and were vicious to me in both the open small press e-mail forum and their own publications. I thought they were my friends. I lost so much sleep over the public humiliation that I had to be hospitalized. I wish people in the small press were more mature. The situation prompted my friends to add a sentence to their monthly poetry broadside, ”This broadside is dedicated to the small press and the way things used to be.”

     It all began innocently enough in October 1996. I was determined to start my own poetry magazine after three years in the small press world. By the time the magazine folded four years later, I was in the hospital having a nervous breakdown!

      I had always wanted to do a magazine or my own publication. I remember hand writing an 8 page newspaper parody called The Daily Bla, in Seventh Grade in 1978. I borrowed many of the jokes from comedian George Carlin , Mad magazine and the original Saturday Night Live Weekend Update news parody! Headline: Airplanes Mate In Mid-Air! , and a drawing of the Space Shuttle piggybacking a ride on a 747 Jumbo Jet to gain entry in outer space. I knew about copyright laws, but I couldn't resist pinching these jokes. I still have the one and only copy of The Daily Bla in my desk folder. It's yellowed, dog-eared and coffee-stained now, but it was a labour of love.

     I started writing poetry in 1989 to deal with the death of my best friend Mark Waser, who died in a car crash in high school in 1981. Writing poetry is an excellent way to deal with your problems, although you can never bring back a loved one. I'd give up all my success as a poet to bring Mark back. Getting published for the first time in 1993 whet my appetite to want to have my own poetry magazine. The couple that published me, Dave and Ana Christy of Alpha Beat Press, New Hope, PA., are well known in the small press and started publishing Beat writers when no one else was, in the mid 1980’s. They did a yearly big 100 page magazine called Bouillabaisse, but it became too expensive so now they just do a monthly broadside, Cokefishing In Alpha Beat Soup, equal to 4 pages of poetry, a folded over 11 x 17 paper. I kept making all sorts of suggestions, why not put out a monthly small magazine, until I thought to myself, well, maybe I should mind my own business and publish my own damn magazine! Dave and Ana were happy that I wasn't bothering them anymore with suggestions, and they helped launch my magazine with flyers asking for submissions. I also listed in the Poet's Market, a yearly big book of thousands of listings, essential in the small press. The word got out, submissions started rolling in, and by November I was putting together the debut January 1997 issue of my poetry magazine Lucid Moon.

      I borrowed again, this time an image from The New Yorker depicting a parody of the famous photo of a Navy guy and his gal kissing in the street in celebration that the war was over, but this drawing The New Yorker had was two Navy guys kissing! I used it for my flyer announcing the magazine, with the headline Something To Celebrate! I loved it because I was bisexual and wanted a gay-friendly magazine. The magazine wasn't going to be explicitly gay, just gentle and humorous and gay-friendly in scope. The first one to submit a poem and buy a subscription was Ed Galing, a 79 year old retired poet who was Poet Laureate of Hatboro, PA. Ed is prolific and funny, and writes alternately humorous and serious reminiscences of his years in the Army and fighting in WWII, and growing up poor in the Jewish neighborhoods of Philly and NYC. God Bless Ed Galing, I hope I have his charisma when I am 80. What he is doing is important, preserving memories from another generation. He is very prolific and well known in the small press, published everywhere now, but boy did he used to pester me about when I was going to publish him next! I had him in every issue, sometimes as much as 15 pages. He also drew sloppy but funny cartoons as I did, we didn't care, we just did it out of joy and a sense of fun. Ed had a cartoon character, Sadie The Psychic, who was Astrologist to the Stars and reminisced about all the famous people she met in her memoirs, 2 typed pages an issue, ran 10 issues. The magazine grew from 25 pages to over 300, I know it was ridiculous, but I had a soft heart and wanted to give deserving poets a chance. I was tired of being rejected. I tried to reject people softly, let them down easy, but I took about 90% of the submissions I received. By the end I was taking 25%, but the magazine was too big too late.

      I named my magazine Lucid Moon, kind of a clear/crazy connotation for all the crazy poets I had ever encountered. I figured we're all looney, let's give each other a chance. I had a wide variety of styles, from high school beginners to up and coming poets to polished writers to famous poets like Allen Ginsberg, Ana Christy (my friend who was world famous), Arthur Rimbaud, A.D. Winans, Charles Bukowski, Jack Micheline and Herschel Silverman. All the aforementioned except for Rimbaud were Beat writers, famous too. I received permission to publish each of them. The magazine was a truer cross-section of styles than those academic and college journals, which edit all the juice, variety and fun out a magazine to make a dull, uniform publication. I was going to have fun with Lucid Moon. The title of my magazine also has another meaning. I also like to take long walks at midnight when the stars are out and the moon is full, it's cold and you can see your breath and clear your mind. I wrote a poem to this effect, Lucid Moon, about hitchhiking across America and taking it all in, in all its terrible beauty. This Lucid Moon poem is on the homepage of my website, www.lucidmoonpoetry.com, which grew out of the magazine.

      I met many colorful people in the four years that I did the magazine, and I cherish the friendships I've made, but too many people would pester me about when I was going to put them in the magazine! I tried to appease everybody by taking at least one poem from each submission batch, and this lead to trouble. The magazine ballooned from 25 pages to over 300 pages, and the biggest issue was 386 pages and two sections (!) The prestigious Cedar Hill Review voted me Editor Of The year and named me Hardest Working Editor in the Small Press my first year out in 1997, which was flattering, but I felt I didn't deserve it and by the third and final year I felt like a parody of an editor. Many people work hard in the small press, and some were jealous that I was awarded that moniker. People started to talk behind my back, and then the hate mail started and all hell broke loose in the small press. An anonymous guy named Diahreapunk e-mailed me a note parodying how I'll publish anyone, and wrote a joke poem to that effect as well. Like an idiot I responded, I guess e-mails were new and exciting to me and the fastness of the reply was enticing. I wrote a mockery of his letter and sent it to him, pretending his gentle ribbing didn't matter to me. Then he turned ugly and wrote back and cursed at me and attacked my sexuality, my weight, my magazine, my mother (who helped finance my magazine), it was just vicious. I answered two more letters and stopped, but Diahreapunk continued for 12 more letters, with, libel, slander, abusive language, death threats, extortion, and illegal spamming of my list. He must have been mentally ill and in a psychotic state. He sent his rants out to everyone on my private email list, after I neglected to use the blind undisclosed recipients feature on my computer. I used cursing too, so I was afraid to report him to the FCC and the FBI. I was livid, and in my extreme state of mind I stayed up for three days in a row with little sleep and forgot to take my lithium for manic depression. I decided to check myself into the Behavioral Health Ward of the local hospital for a week to get some sleep. Meanwhile other people were ganging up on me too and the e-mails were flying all over the world.

      I decided to put the magazine to bed in October of 1999 immediately started the Lucid Moon Poetry Website in November 1999. I was tired of all the criticisms about the magazine, I thought to myself I’d edit my magazine any damn way I want, but it was really the expense that got to me. I recovered from the nervous breakdown episode and for the next few months things were quiet, but then Diahreapunk started up again in the spring of 2001. I like to live my life as an open book, so people can identify or look up to me, but sometimes I may be too open with my audience. I wrote about staying in the hospital on my website, and Diahreapunk read it and started hate mailing me again in an open public forum through e-mails. He started the Lucid Moon/Diahreapunk Letters Website on his publishing website, stole my picture and the story of my hospital stay, and put them on his website to humiliate me. I threatened to sue him if he didn't take down the website, but he laughed at me and ignored me. The website is still up, but it doesn't bother me anymore. When I was in the hospital, one of the counselors gave out a photocopy of a quote by Goethe, which reads:

"I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humour, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming." – Goethe

I sent that to Diahreapunk but he didn't understand the message, he was too skewed with hate to think logically.

     I'm glad I'm no longer doing the magazine, it cost $1000 an issue for 150 300 page monthly copies, ridiculous. If I had to do it all over again I would have done a professionally printed 100 page issue bimonthly. The Lucid Moon Poetry Website reaches thousands more people at a fraction of the cost (only $150 a month to post things), and it saves trees! Everyone had a good laugh on me, putting down my editing skills with my magazine, but I have the last laugh. The Lucid Moon website has been called the best poetry website on the internet, and I'm editing it selectively. I send out a daily e-mail column called A Poem A Day Helps Keep The Psychiatrist Away, 2-3 short poems by myself and various authors, inspired by all the submissions I received of poems about the September 11 World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist air crash disasters. This is a popular feature, and I also send out a monthly poetry book review column. If you'd like to receive either, just write me at ralphylucidmoon@yahoo.com

      I've learned a lot about editing by having my own poetry magazine and poetry website, and I would do it differently now. I do miss it though, as do hundreds of other poets, who say they used to read the magazine from cover to cover. Berkeley, CA performance artist Frank Moore compared Lucid Moon Poetry Magazine to the prestigious Evergreen Review (now in website form only just like my Lucid Moon Poetry Website), which is a great compliment. I can live with the praise, but the criticisms hurt initially. Now I just chalk it up to jealous pettiness and backstabbing, which the small press is full of. I wish people were kinder and more mature in the small press. There is a rogue element of cyber-stalkers and jealous critics who are cynical and think it is their job to change the small press, but they are non-entities and will remain on the fringe. They are just "jealous bitches" as Arnold Schwarzennegger called much of Hollywood! I know I am one of the best editors out there and have one of the best poetry sites around, and for that I am proud. My two poetry books, Wounded Heart, Naked Soul and Scattershot Haze: A Tribute To The Beats have also been critically acclaimed, and are available at 1-888-7Xlibris. I have 6 more poetry books ready to be published, and I am having fun in the small press. So what if my magazine lead to a nervous breakdown, I gained a lot of insight, killed a few brain cells but grew new ones, and I learned a lot about human nature.

      I cherish the friends I have made in the small press, including Ed Galing. I call him every two months and he submits to my poetry website but doesn't have a computer and hasn't seen it yet. The website is cute, has colorful cartoons by me on every page, and the homepage is animated, with a wolf howling at the moon, the moon winking at the wolf, the stars twinkling and the waterfall flowing. It's a satellite of love for poets, a safe haven for Lucid Moonies everywhere! I call Dave and Ana Christy every week and visit them twice a month for dinner. They have become my best friends, like a second set of parents. And I have made many other friends in the small press. It's my home, it feels like home, and no amount of craziness or hate mail could keep me away from it. The Small Press: it's an addiction!

      I have been in the small press for 10 years now, and have had my share of criticisms and praise. I did the Ralphabeat Radio Show on Frank Moore’s Luver Radio internet website with Dave and Ana Christy of Alpha Beat Press, New Hope, Pa. from 1998 to 2000. We'd meet at the Chinese Buffet in New Hope for dinner.   We would then retire to their house for drinks and we'd make the 90 minute talk/music tapes. We thought we had good radio voices and a good rapport. We thought we were as funny as Howard Stern but we didn't get paid 15 million dollars a year like him! I had a misunderstanding with Frank Moore, but I hope to make up with him.

      I published the photocopied Lucid Moon Poetry Magazine from 1997 to 1999.  My first year out in 1997, I was named Cedar Hill Review's Editor of the Year/Hardest Working Editor in the Small Press.  People said they read Lucid Moon from cover to cover. I was very democratic as an editor and tried to give everyone a chance from high school beginners to more polished writers to famous names such as Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski.  The magazine became too expensive so I put it to bed in 1999.  I immediately launched my critically lauded Lucid Moon Poetry Website. It has been called the best poetry website on the internet, a valuable resource for poets and it was rated highly by Google (www.lucidmoonpoetry.com).

      In 2000 and 2001, I was harshly criticized by several colleagues who ganged up on me and were vicious to me in both the open small press e-mail forum and their own publications. I thought they were my friends. I haven't heard from them since. You can read about that experience in my humourous article How Publishing My Lucid Moon Poetry Magazine Led To My Nervous Breakdown and my humourous roman a clef short story Titus Andronicus 2: The Revenge, both in my website archives.

     In October 8, 2001, I suffered a horrible, serious, near-fatal car accident. I am paralyzed below the waist and in my right writing hand. It takes me one hour to type one paragraph and four hours to type one page. I’m not wallowing in anger or self-pity, but I am continuing with my projects.  I'm working on my 3rd book and am launching Lucid Moon Review Poetry Newsletter, a quarterly. You can download it from my site after it is posted each quarter. If you would like to be on my email list please write to me at ralphylucidmoon@yahoo.com.

     My first two books, Wounded Heart, Naked Soul  (heart-felt romantic love poems) and Scattershot Haze (a tribute to the beat poets and musicians) are available for $16 plus $4.95 postage and can be ordered directly from Xlibris at 1-888-7Xlibris, www.Xlibris.com , www.Amazon.com , www.BarnesandNoble.com , and www.Borders.com

      In May 2003, I totally overhauled the website and added several new poetry areas. All the poetry columns are guest book-like areas.  You can enter one poem per column per week.  I no longer send out the poetry column A Few Poems a Day Helps Keep The Psychiatrist Away. You can read all about my upcoming books and the new poetry areas on my website in the new area called What’s It All About Ralphy? on my homepage. My books are an affordable luxury and my website and newsletter are my free gifts to the world!

      In December 2003, I converted the homepage into the Lucid Moon Review Poetry Newsletter, a quarterly 30 page newsletter that you can print out for free from the website. The newsletter consists of color cartoons by me on the cover, the homepage cartoon of the wolf howling at the moon which has become my website trademark, my contact information, different quotes each issue praising my website drawn from my guest books, a Lucid Moon cartoon drawn by NYC illustrator Nina Bogin and scripted by me, a Message from Ralphy, poems, short stories, articles and book review. You can print out the homepage newsletter every three months, staple it, pass it around, and collect em all! I’m having fun doing my poetry website and poetry projects.

Lucid Moon Review Poetry Website and Newsletter
Ralph Haselmann Jr., Editor, 67 Norma Road Hampton, New Jersey 08827
(908) 735-4447,ralphylucidmoon@yahoo.com, www.lucidmoonpoetry.com.

© Copyright 2004 Ralph Haselmann Jr. and Lucid Moon Review Poetry Website