Poetry is a craft as well as an art. It’s a resource for surviving, as well as an ornament for the good life. I’ve carried poetry along with me since I was 16 years old and now I’m 66. It’s served me well.
I’ve never had a poem 'officially' published before, but I have been an English teacher and a newspaper reporter. There’s 18,000 words in this book, divided into 47 poems. It is indeed, my life’s work.
My poems try to use every emotion available to make the point that we should go on, that we can go one, and even, that it’s fun to go on. I guess whimsy and irony occur as frequently as anything else in my work. When I was a kid the word 'tragi-comic' was popular in the vocabulary of modernism. I still like that word.
