Dirty Little Secrets

Poets dedicate their craft to penning emotion. They are artists of observation, watching, perceiving, and feeling everything that occurs in the inner and outer worlds. Peoples’ moods, subtle or not, do not escape the poet. The poet perceives and feels the frailty of the natural Inner World, the Outer World, and the OtherWorld and the hazy boundaries that occur in Nature, yet they can often See or Feel the brilliance and strength of the creative Source from which all things originate. Poetry is a means of putting words to those experiences, a means of dealing with that which has no words to describe it. Indeed, when caught in circumstances for which we have no words, such as during times of war, or some cataclysmic event, or some major emotional upheaval, it is often to poetry that we look for validation and healing.

“What is poetry which does not save nations and peoples?” Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz asked.

Indeed, I believe that the writing and reading of poetry can be somewhat cathartic for both the writer and the reader, for it is through poetry that we work through our emotions and come to terms with our experiences, using the sounds and rhythms of words as an artist would use pigments upon a canvas.

I have often been asked “Why do you write?” My answer is, to quote from one of the most prolific writers on this planet…

“I write for the same reason I breathe — because if I didn’t, I would die.” — Isaac Asimov

I may not be a particularly good poet and I’ll be the first to admit that… I am, after all, my own worst critic, but I haven’t had any sort of formal training in writing poetry, so perhaps I don’t follow all of the “rules” of poetry, from an academic point of view. Still, I know from what others have told me, that they enjoy my writings. For me, that’s all that really matters… that I enjoy writing poems and people seem to enjoy reading them.

Some of the things I write about are veiled in language obscured by cultural ethos, historical background, and experience. Some of the subjects I choose to write about are not what they (at first) appear to be. “Sorry”, for example, is written to the Goddess whose name is Ériu (later called Éire), and she is the Goddess of Sovereignty over Ireland… knowing that little fact changes your whole perspective on that poem. Other poems have other hidden / subtle meanings, often based upon my own experiences and emotions. What you get out of a particular poem is left up to you to decide.

Above all, know this… I do this out of love.

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