The following post is a personal side journey. It’s unrelated to the mission of this blog, so if you don’t want to stray from the main track, you may want to skip it.
Spending my sunset years as a Counterjihad blogger was not part of my life’s plan. I just kind of fell into it, joining Dymphna at the task after I was laid off in 2006. It seemed like a worthwhile endeavor, so I kept at it full-time for the next sixteen years (and counting).
Before that I had pursued numerous occupations since I graduated from college: taxi driver, tuxedo store manager, messenger for a legal firm, mathematician/programmer, systems analyst, sign painter, painter of ceramic cups, Kelly Girl, seller of mistletoe (seasonal only). I took all of those jobs just to keep the wolf from the door while I did the two things I was put on this earth to do: paint landscapes and write poetry.
I was fortunate enough to be able to paint for a (meager) living for more than twenty-five years. And I was especially fortunate to have married someone who understood my drive to create, and who was willing to help support me via her own employment. For that I will be eternally grateful to Dymphna; may she rest in peace.
As you all know, I ruined my eyesight by sitting outside in the bright sun day after day for decades. My intuition tells me that having my retinas bathed in so much ultraviolet light for all those years brought on macular degeneration at a relatively early age. Since I gave up painting in 2005 I have been reduced to programming digital images on the computer to satisfy my visual creative urge.
When I was eighteen years old I started writing poetry seriously — or as seriously as a callow clownish youth can do at that age. Almost everything I wrote before I was in my mid-twenties was dreadful stuff, and embarrassing to look at now, but a few things were worth saving, and have held up over the decades. By the time I was in my late thirties the quality of what I wrote was more consistent. I really hit my stride in the mid-’90s and early 2000s.
I encountered a fallow period after 2006, when the muse abandoned me for eleven years. I thought she was gone for good, and that my poetic career was over. Then in 2017 she mysteriously returned, and I started writing verse again. At that point it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to self-publish a volume of selected poems.
I gave up submitting my poems to periodicals thirty years ago. By then it had become clear that the type of poetry I write — traditional forms, often with a rigorous rhyme scheme and metrical structure — was out of step with the post-modern age. I got tired of the rejection slips, so I abandoned all attempts at publication. I haven’t published anything since a number of my poems (most of them lousy) appeared in William and Mary’s literary magazine back in the early 1970s.
Until now, that is. Thanks to the magic of self-publishing, I was able to put together a selection in a book entitled The Nothing Tree in Bloom. It contains all the poems from a fifty-year period (1970-2019) that I consider worth reading, and is listed on Amazon.
Self-publication turned out to be very easy, and it cost almost nothing, unlike vanity publishing. Actually, I suppose it is a form of vanity publishing, because I don’t really expect to sell any copies of the book. I just bought a few dozen author’s copies at a low price to give away to family and friends. It’s a satisfying way to wrap up a lifetime’s worth of work in a meaningful fashion. As Wallace Stevens said (in “The Lack of Repose”), the book provides “A few sounds of meaning, a momentary end / To the complication”.
I dedicated The Nothing Tree in Bloom to Dymphna. It makes me sad that she didn’t live to see it published, but she did read an early PDF version of it, which included the cover design. At that point the dedication page read: “For my wife”. In the published version it reads: “In memory of my wife”.
Since I’ve never published any poems since college, I’ve never had an editor. Fortunately, for forty years I had Dymphna to act in that capacity. As most of you know, she was an accomplished poet in her own right.
From 1979 until her death she read everything I wrote, including the most recent poem in the book. She was an incisive reader and critic, and never hesitated to point out infelicities and suggest changes. My oeuvre would have been far less competent without her input.
It was my habit to read every poem out loud to her as soon as I finished it. In later years, as her hearing deteriorated, I would print out a second copy so that she could follow along while I read it. After she died I found a pile of many years’ worth of those printed pages on the bottom shelf of the bookcase next to her side of the bed.
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When I was a teenager attending an English grammar school, I was required to study large quantities of poetry in depth for my O-level and A-level exams. It was like discovering a magnificent palace filled with treasure, and I took to it as if it were my natural environment. At the time I didn’t understand that most of my fellow students experienced it quite differently: it was just something they had to do, to memorize and analyze long enough to pass their exams, and then gratefully forget.
In the ensuing years I’ve learned the hard lesson that poetry is an acquired taste. Most people don’t get it, and aren’t interested in getting it. And that’s especially true of the type of poetry I prefer to write, which admittedly is intellectually abstruse.
With that in mind, I’ve chosen two examples from the book to post here that are somewhat more accessible.
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