I don’t write in a journal everyday, but I have accumulated many entries over the past 50+ years beginning in 1966. Some items evolved into longer works. Among the leftovers little pieces survived. I thought a collection of these with a piece culled from the same date in a past year would make an interesting yearbook. The consistencies and inconsistencies of mind, skipping back and forth across time, provide varied perspectives. It is difficult to remember the context of the past we’ve lived; we also make suppositions about times that predate ourselves.

The few alterations from original drafts were to improve clarity. The worst of my work is not included. There remains enough mediocrity and immaturity to make me feel humble and you feel smart. There are also moments of accidental insight and incidental humor.

Author Stephen Crane referred to his little pieces as pills…apparently they were small and somewhat hard to swallow, but good for you.


Comments Welcome!

Sunday, January 5, 2020

Poets on Poetry Speaking to Me


from this week of 2019 (I was 74)

         Poets on Poetry Speaking to Me
Why hasn’t America won the battle of the Iambic Five?        -Karl Shapiro
Frost had particular poems he said he “liked saying”            -Robert Frost
I think I am a saying poet                                                 -John Ciardi
hearing the words as if they were spoken to me                  -Ray Sheele
like conversation…not so long it taxes attention                   -Marianne Moore
I like the spare interactive play of talk                                -Josephine Miles
I can read aloud in my natural speaking voice                     -John Holmes
Those I took least seriously were least labored                   -Michael Hamburger
without forethought as if it were waiting in the wings           -Howard Moss
to surprise me with how much more I knew than I knew      -Robert Wallace
written quickly with rightness and concentration                  -Elizabeth Jennings
seems to carry within itself a melody I can hear                  -Langston Hughes
the parts at play with one another                                     -Brewster Ghiselin
to say something with as much simple lucidity as I could      -William Dickey
progress through images to a point it makes a statement      -Galway Kinnell
you realize something you could not understand before        -Greg Corso
I fancy it sounds like a different better poet than myself       -Philip Larkin
planned and grand and helter skelter and unexpected          -Robert Lowell
rooted in the secrecy of life and means more than it says      -Stanley Kunitz
a mix truth & lies I don’t feel like confessing which is which   -Ann Sexton
and an impulse to maintain dynamic interplay of the two      -Denise Levertov
Realization of the utter amazement of finding myself alive     -Alastair Reid
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