Poetry

I’ve written poetry since I was a child having fun making greeting cards. In high school I wrote poetry for the literary magazine and in the margins of my chemistry notes. It was mostly experimental verse, partly playful and partly adolescent issues. In college I tried to write more serious poetry, but lacked literary depth. Later I worked on a theory of poetry in which completeness and inconsistency plays a large role, with echos of Laws of Form. I started compiling Experiments in Poetic Form, which I now see as my Leaves of Grass, to be expanded and re-edited indefinitely. I wrote poetry during courtship and early marriage. For a long time there wasn’t time for it. Since retirement I’ve taken up some very simple poetic forms.

I see in poetry the attempt to present some one thing complete, as if for the first time. Representation loses that immediacy. Go to the ant, thou sluggard. Form looms large, until it may seem that the form is the content. But wisdom literature is poetic in its own way. Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.

Below are links to pdfs of some of these poems, in booklet format. If you want to print them, note this: in Printer Properties, turn duplex on and set to flip on short edge (over, not up); in Acrobat, set Print – Page Sizing & Handling – Booklet, Binding position – Left, Orientation – Portrait.

Experiments in Poetic Form

Something Old, Something New

Tributes