I may well have a tin ear for poetry. Yet over the years, I have sporadically tried my hand at writing it.

My first attempt was a booklet of poems made at the age of fifteen. The self-illustrated cover depicted a hand clutching towards a thorny rose. The only piece I remember from that effort was called ‘Goat of God.’ Although it invoked teen angst with Nazi imagery––its rhythm and rhyme were more akin to doggerel than to poetry.

Over the following year or two, a growing awareness of a want of literacy somewhat inhibited the fledgling poetic muse. By seventeen, I was developing a taste for literature and sporadically keeping a journal–– but still occasionally writing ‘free verse’.  Most memorable from that time was a lengthy narrative poem entitled ‘The Barber Woman.’  It was inspired by Keats’ ‘Le belle Dame Sans Merci’ and based on my own dream-time encounter with a dark-haired succubus. I was proud of it but dreaded its discovery no less than being caught in self-abuse…

I continued to dabble though college years.  As much as I took to academia, the erudition of critics and professorial poets was sometimes intimidating.  I particularly recall the impact of Ezra Pound’s ‘A Few Don’ts’ advice to would-be poets. He seemed to scorn anyone who had the temerity to try to write poetry in English without knowing the grammar of Attic Greek.  

Over the quarter century that followed, I retained enough audacity to squeeze out occasional poems. Yet I less frequently read the old masters and paid no attention at all to the new voices in the genre. I increasingly regarded poetry like lute-playing or penmanship–– a dying art.  I could not be sure whether my little horde of coprolite pellets would even be recognized as ‘poetry’ by those who had genuinely earned their stripes in the craft…

Upon acquiring word-processing, I did take the trouble of digitizing the contents of a couple of stuffed manillas. Perhaps only a handful of the poems written from my mid-twenties to early fifties were half decent. None seemed worthy the investment of an envelope with return postage for obtaining a rejection slip.  I had no illusion that my digital folder of old poems might contain hidden gems for post-mortem discovery.

Still, in a recent pre-mortem perusal of that digitized ‘drawer’, I was struck by several poems written between 2003-2013. That was not due to any stand-out quality.  It was rather that some struck me as searing mementos of a time which was too fraught to write about in the usual journal format.

In that decade, I felt enormous pressure––both on the domestic and on the work front. Journal entries about my daily trials tended to implode in blathers of rage, frustration or bitterness. After multiple deletions, I sometimes resorted to a more effectively indirect mode of self-expression.  That mode happened to be similar to the one first worked amid teenage angst…

These thirty-three poems selected from that late period probably reflect more of captivity to self-doubt than to external pressures. Ergo, I call them ‘poems of self-imposed captivity.’  It is fully acknowledged that they may egregiously violate all twenty-three of Pound’s requirements for worthy poetry.  I launch them into this public space–– if for nothing else but a break from the gloomy political scene… 

Selected poems (33 pp. file)

OPEN:

-2025, October

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