Greetings, Everyone!
As you can see from my commitment to lifetime membership in Poetry Soup, poetry is very important to me, as a vehicle for sharing deep, subtle, and usually beautiful images. Society as a whole is so desperately in need of this influence, and yet poets have such a hard time being noticed, in the midst of the rat race and the glut of less-than-inspirational books on the market. Poetry Soup seems to be doing a great job in supporting us in our vision and work.
I have been writing poetry for about fifty years. I started out by doing stream-of-consciousness stuff, and over the years, have developed a system for refining my poems, so that they end up in crystallized form, usually with a specific meter that seems to arise from the poem itself. I often work on a poem for several years, until I get a consistent feeling that it's as good as it's going to get. The final step is sometimes to put freshness back into the poem.
My purpose in writing is to give full expression to a feeling or idea in a particular context, with the hope that the poem will assist readers in accessing these same feelings or ideas in themselves.
I have written and co-authored a number of books, including Poems of Peace and Renewal, A Collection of Uplifting Poems, Mystical Poems by Three Contemporary New England Writers, and Halloween Enchantment; Haunting Poems and Stories. Most of these books include work by classical poets, i.e., Wordsworth, Longfellow, Dickinson, Poe.
I have also created a DVD (Poems of Enchantment), which consists of beautiful multimedia presentations of 19 poems, some classical, some written by me. These multimedia presentations have also been uploaded to YouTube, and you can find links to some of them on my Poetry Soup poetry page. Check out the magical Wynken, Blynken, and Nod production on my YouTube channel, Idyllic Productions.
Of course I love it when people read my poems, and I welcome comments. I enjoy reading poems by other writers, also, and I'm always thrilled when I find an inspiring, well-written poem--it's like going on a treasure hunt.
Happy reading and writing!