I'd written poetry when I was a teenager, but wrote very little afterwards. In about 2004, way past my youth, a poet friend suggested that I should write. I was skeptical because I believed that writing poetry was a gift to exceptional people. It was not for a career and family man like me who liked to read. But I was blessed with a solid ego and with boldness and curiosity. And I had a liking for my teenage work -- now lost -- and an interest in the few poems I'd written later. I also had more intellectual background than I'd ever accounted. In college, I'd taken what I realize now was a life-changing college class in English literature. I'd studied Latin and Greek, and they gave me their great gift: a love of clear language and beautiful expression.
The result: I began writing in 2004. I have not stopped since. I admit, though, that here have been times when I have wanted to stop because I felt that "enough was enough" or that I was not enjoying this work or that I had nothing to say or that the Muse had become a nag. In other words, I've had a writing life similar to other writing lives. And, as in those lives, there are high moments, and they are wonderful.
The result of the writing is that I have in my hands a body of work that I never dreamed would come into existence. When I read the poems, I find that I become excited as a reader and not as the writer. This excitement is telling me two things. First, that the poems have something to say. Second, that they have achieved independence from me, that they exist in their own right. They are important enough to preserve.
Although the poems are independent, they are delicate, easily lost, and unable to fend for themselves. They have to be saved from flood and fire. A blog is the best way to do this because I am guessing that the internet will last in some way, shape, or form until the end of civilization. With the poems on the internet, I don't have to worry about all those pieces of paper, the thumb drives, the backups, the different word processing products I have used. I can preserve them in the "ether." It is a gift that all the ancient and medieval readers and scribes must have wished for. Really, it's a gift that even the lovers of paper books want.
If I blog the poems, others might read them. The poems should communicate. I don't pretend to expect universal readership! But I can hope that the poems will be part of my legacy, the inheritance of my children and grandchildren. In my own life and attitudes, legacy has given me perspective that is animated by curiosity and love. It also brings connection, knowledge, and sometimes even understanding or at least the right questions.
A blog also gives me the opportunity to comment on my poems. There are those who say that a poet should not explain. I'm not sure I agree. I think that, if poems are part of our life and culture, a gloss, in the medieval sense of the word, might sometimes be part of them. They bind us together over centuries into a unity that is the larger commonwealth.
