Just a few years ago, after “retiring” from a long and satisfying educational career, I found myself creating poetic phrases in my mind, by way of the creative unknown. Rarely, these phrases were clear and somewhat complete poems, with recognizable messages and topics, but most of the time, they were bits and pieces which seemed to have obscure meanings requiring thought and clarity. In other words as a result, and to my surprise, when many of these thoughts, images, and phrases first “came to me”, I felt a need to make sense of what had appeared. Furthermore, I consistently had a desire to revise, edit, and structure as needed. And then, words finally found their way on paper, or as often happened, on a Word document. This desire and need to write poetry continues to be with me to this very day.
I am learning, since until this very recent time period, poetry writing had not been an avocation of mine. Recently, I have spent some time reading about good poetry, and also reading poems by famous poets, and many less known contemporary ones. Even though I did teach poetry to students, and wrote a rare poem or phrase sporadically and rarely throughout the years, I was not a writer of poetry. Looking forward to see what the future holds.