Introduction

Hi. My name is Jake Sheff. I'm a resident physician in Ohio training in pediatrics with the USAF, as well as a published poet whose first book was just released today by Alabaster Leaves Publishing, titled Looting Versailles (available currently on Amazon).

I'm not sure what I want this blog to be yet. Maybe each post will be an amalgamation of my most recent "deep thoughts" on poetry aesthetics / theory, or maybe some will be references to an interesting disease I've seen at work. Likely some will be humorous snippets (re: funny lies), others may be a quick nod to a poem or poet I like, or an interesting link online. Aside from medicine and poetry, I read Art in America, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine and a lot of science articles on the web. I try to read short stories here and there. Novels are tough to get through with my hours at work, though I'm currently making my way (slowly) through Remembrance of Things Past by Proust. I don't watch movies as much as I used to, more TV series, generally on pay channels i.e. Rome, The Sopranos, Dexter, True Blood. Movies used to be a great love of mine, until I started residency and lost the ability to stay awake during one.

Really, I just want a place for self-expression but self-edited self-expression. Hopefully, the antithesis of the typical Facebook status. I will strive to be interesting, cogent, a worthwhile read.

As a captain in the USAF, I'll abstain from political statements.

Mostly, this blog will be a way of having a presence on the internet, now that I have a book available and since I plan on continuing to write poetry and have it published in various outlets.

I hope people will come here and leave messages; I'd like to have conversations with the people that come here, supposing they have come here through reading my poetry and not some other way.

With that, I think I've said what I need to to initiate my blog into the blogosphere. I thought it strange when Dan Rather signed off his final CBS newscast with "Courage," but now as I sign off my first blog post I hear it ringing in my ears. And so it goes...

Courage.