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, Mystical Poems by Three Contemporary New England Writers, and Stardust, Shadows, and Secrets. The latter is a combination of poems, essays, and a novella about a young woman who finds an unexplained light and a secret society in the woods behind her house. I have requested these books to be available in the Poetry Soup bookstore, and they are also available as paperbacks and e-books on Amazon.
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!