Feeling, in a poet, is the source of others’ feeling

– Lord Byron

I’m revisiting this page after a decade plus, tripping over the millennium, speed limit approaching 80 with the pedal to the floor, still mining words as if each was a new and exciting discovery. On Writing Poetry calls for an update.

I didn’t start out to be a poet.  Can’t remember a poet or a line of poetry that might have set me on a lifetime avocation.  Nothing in my early education gave any indication that words would be my way of expression, would be my connection to the universal essence from which all creativity stems.  Poetry became the feelings beyond the thoughts that allowed me to come out from under the covers and express myself. Words have, since that humble beginning, been my companion, my vibrational sounding board, a not so silent witness to the evolution of Body, Mind and Spirit. 

I’m not sure whether poetry followed me or I followed it over the last fifty plus years. It was a way of staying in touch with myself, the internal vibrational tuning fork that kept me in balance.  In retrospect there were many fallow times when I became lost to myself.  There were times when the silent observer was nowhere to be found.  When the body and mind usurped pen and paper, when the spirit was lost in mindlessness. Poetry however, once it has a hold of you never lets go, for it is, in your conscious awareness, the essence of who you are and how you view yourself in harmony with all that is.  Yes it is form, it is the outcome of a wordsmiths’ romance with the written word, yet its’ existence in print or in voice carries us soulfully down Alice’s rabbit hole into a dimension of understanding and awareness of who we really are. 

Over decades nothing escapes the poets’ pen.  Every mountain climbed, every dark alley stumbled onto, every emotional experience tumbled from the heart and head onto scraps of paper that I carried with me when all else was left behind in a scrapyard of broken dreams and promises.  After having waded through the Oxford Book of English Verse and The Chief American Poets, I tampered with sonnets, villanelle, rondeaus, odes, etc., never getting past the exercise of writing poems.  I intrinsically understood that “poetic quality is not marshaled in rhyme or uniformity,” as Walt Whitman wrote, but until I found my own voice in free form, I was stuck in a never ending cycle of visiting one confessional after another and searching for the right word, the right line.

It was not a time without heroes; the minimalistic beauty of Pablo Neruda and E.E. Cummings, the inner wilderness of the unconscious mind of a Gary Snyder; the streaming consciousness of Pound, and Ginsberg; were inspiring to me, W. S. Merwin, Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, and Charles Olsen to name a few, were all signposts pointing the way towards reaching inside and speaking with my own unique voice.  This was a time when poetry broke the bonds of closed poetic forms and tradition; poets spun their poems in an open field of perception upon perception setting loose in bars and coffee houses Olsen’s Projective Verse of “young poets breathing hard and pausing significantly at the end of each line.” 

Poetry is cathartic, therapeutic, liberating, healing and very personal.  It exposes oneself to the elements, laying bare ones’ innermost feelings and emotions before an imaginary audience.  It is letting go and not being afraid of breaking boundaries. Body, mind and spirit to this poet represent a seasoning, hopefully an amelioration of what I have tried to convey through the poem. In the early days my poems touched on the physical world as a silent observer to what I encountered.  Then came the long and labyrinthine path toward mindfulness, followed by the search for the meaning of that Spirit within me, intertwined in everything I feel, think and do.  Or as Deepak Chopra put it, “Looking for spirit, the Vedic sages observed, is like a thirsty fish looking for water… “What is Spirit? is another way of asking Who am I?”

Poetry then becomes the lifeblood of the poet.  The moment you breathe it in, it rummages in the blood stream, crystallizes in the lungs where it can take wing, and exhale into the dimension of its manifest, leaving behind a thought: a raindrop on a petal, a whisper on a breeze carrying a word, a phrase, a seed nurtured in memory, in surprise. In harmony with a note from a symphony of rhyme shaped by the world it is gifted with, the letters take on a life of their own.

Thoughts synapse in a haze, naked, fumbling blindly in the dark, tangled in a maze of dense vine kicking and flailing; a dream floundering in a matrix of letters and emotion in a plea for meaning, until just above the horizon, a glimmering image, a sound, undecipherable at first; a pitched battle between cacophony, euphony, assonance, consonance, pounding on the door of poem, all seeking recognition of purpose. Enter the lovers, dancing to a distant voice, that wraps love & hope in its arms, or huddled in the corner of the mind a frightened adolescent, confused, tormented by awareness of a world view where truth hurts and seeks an audience.

In the end, pen to paper opens to interpretation; a rare bird’s melody, a mood ring wrapped around the mind touching a heart, tweaking a memory, a clean laundry of words hanging on a line in a stanza of breeze, an image wanting, seeking consent. A poet owns the world he inherits, so too a poem left to its own.

O