Poetry

The first poems I wrote were, as well as I can remember, pseudo-Wordsworthian affairs of intense emotion and dubious quality. I was in about seventh or eight grade, and had never actually read poetry till then, excepting perhaps Shel Silverstein and Mother Goose. So it is a generous anachronism to call these early efforts “poetry” at all. They were written by hand in my journal, that much I remember. Perhaps as an intuitive form of mental hygiene? I never showed them to anyone. In 12th grade, then, an English teacher in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Mrs. Brown, had us all write sonnets. As I recall, I wrote mine about a girl I had fallen in love with the previous year, shortly before she returned to Germany. (She had been an exchange student at my former high school, in Boone, North Carolina.) My poem had the phrase “beneath West-German skies,” which I’m sure existed for the purpose of rhyming with “her eyes.” I later learned German in order to woo her, but never had the chance to make the attempt.

Both of these early efforts were more or less knocked from my lungs by the catastrophe of young love. In a sense, this is as it should be, for all poems are really love poems. What else could make one willingly endure the torments of composition? A mere desire for fame? Lust for revenge?

My first real initiation into the craft of poetry occurred in the fall of 1989, when I was a Freshman at UNC-Chapel Hill. I took a creative writing workshop taught by one of the most brilliant men I have ever met, Robert Kirkpatrick, whose brilliance as a teacher, scholar, and poet was matched only by his kindness and integrity as a human being. He was an extraordinary man, who unfortunately passed away before I had a chance to show him a book of my poems. After looking at my first chapbook manuscript, however, he said, after a long silence, “You might actually be a poet.”

Sometimes a poem takes me fifteen minutes to write, sometimes fifteen years. Yet regardless of how long the preparatory meditation, a poem usually comes out in one mental act. That act, however, may be partial and fragmentary, it’s completion not arriving until much later. Rarely have hours and hours of “chiseling” proven useful, except as a form of technical training, since this tends to dull my sense of the overall rhetorical shape or fundamental gesture of the poem.

As time has passed, I’ve noticed my poems moving away from the personal and subjective (memories, dreams, etc.) and toward the objective world of things, natural and man-made, as well as history and culture. I’ve also noticed my tastes changing. The radical compressions of Hopkins and John Berryman and the cryptic fragments of Michael Palmer no longer entice me the way they once did. I’m drawn more and more now to simplicity and transparency, although I couldn’t say for sure whether this is a sign of poetic maturity or of powers on the wane.

Apropos transparency: the links on the right refer to complete book-length manuscripts. While individual poems from these manuscripts have appeared in various journals over the years, the books themselves remain unpublished.