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My efforts at writing and publishing poetry didn't get serious until June of 2021.
To say that came out of nowhere would be highly misleading. My long history with poetry
would seem relevant here, and I'll go into that later. However, to claim that I was ever serious
about the writing and publishing aspect in the decades leading up to June 2021 would be
wishful thinking. Very occasionally, I would think I had a great idea for a poem and get
motivated to try and write it. Many, but not all, of those were sonnets. Leading up to
2021, I'll guestimate that my total output of poems was between 50 and 100. Probably 1/3
of those were sonnets. Only a few were more than a page long. Of those, only about 5 have
survived. Of those, only 1 has been published, and that was a rhyming 8 liner in my high
school literary magazine. I'll save that story for a separate essay (or poem).
By way of comparison, since June of this year, my 68th, I have written over 250 poems, and
there are many more still under progress. Most of these are sonnets. I realize that quantity
isn't everything, but I would say that all but the worst of the more recent work is better
than the best I had written prior to this year. Nothing written previously had even a slight
chance of being published, which didn't stop me from trying a dozen or so times in the pre-electronic
era. Some of the efforts since June have a fighting chance, but we'll see. Some
obvious questions might relate to this, like 1) Why now? 2) Aren't you a little old for this?
3) Do you think you can keep it up, this time? 4) What's your bottom line, or ultimate goal
with this?
Fair enough.
The best, and most interesting, question is the first one: Why now? The best answer is that I
don't know. I was probably more surprised by it than anyone.
I'm sure retirement is a big factor, but that was effective almost six years ago. There were consuming
health issues the first two years, but those now seem distant past. Even given some time to settle
into a retirement routine, it seems I was slow to get back to poetry. It wasn't for lacking an
abundance of time, since my black lab Julz died less than a year into my retirement, freeing up
hours a day. Mostly those went to more physical activity, like biking, not a bad thing, but there
would still have been plenty left for poetry had than been a big desire. In fact, my efforts at
writing credible poetry, let alone publishing it, had been become so weak as to have been almost
forgotten. I had lost having much interest in being a poet. It was as though I just wasn't a poet,
and had no need to even know it.
Possibly the pandemic was a factor, a prod to my sensitivities, but those were pretty solitary already.
Trump was certainly as further incitement, as I've written in my post-modern tribute to him (also available
from the menu above). There is some evidence for that but, for whatever reason, some poetry began
to trickle in among my other posts, mostly to Facebook but also some to Twitter and Instagram. Almost
all of that, along with my other writing, was political. Then one night, back in May, as I was going
to sleep a thought came to mind that felt like a poem. I remembered thinking that in the morning, not exactly,
but enough to write a little piece that I guess was a prose poem. The same experience happened a few
nights later, except the thought was that it felt like a sonnet, and there was already a first line
in mind, and the next day I still remembered that much and was able, fairly quickly, to write the
complete sonnet, plus some. It didn't want to quit. I ended up with 5 quatrains, including an actual
full fledged sonnet, but I preferred the longer version, which still felt like a sonnet. A long
sonnet, actually, but I'll go into that in greater detail elsewhere.
From there, the sonnet writing snowballed, gradually at first, and now here we are. Which, I guess,
leads into the next question. I'm only too old for this if seen as just getting started, but, notwithstanding
my lack of focus on writing and publishing for many years, it's hardly a fresh start. Quite the contrary,
it's much more like a moment that my entire life has been a preparation for. Kind of like Trump becoming
President, in a way, but that's also developed in my post-modern tribute, which, somewhat surprisingly,
barely mentions or hints at poetry. Anyway, my age seems far less relevant if this is viewed in the
perspective of a lifelong project. I had forgotten I had written about this and posted it to Facebook
way back in early June 2021, in a piece I titled "My Life In Sonnets:"
https://www.facebook.com/DaveWilliams53/posts/10226955436210291 I'll see if I can get it posted in
Class Words, but for now I changed the permission on the Facebook post to General Public. Same with
another post from a couple weeks later, which seems relevant to how seriously I was already taking this
back in June, when I was already premeditating a title for a possible book of my own sonnets:
https://www.facebook.com/DaveWilliams53/posts/10227052557038251. I'm now thinking more along the
lines of several shorter book length collections (including chapbooks), but SAGA may still work if
there would ever be something like my collected works. LOL.
It's a good thing I learned early on that posting poems on Facebook while trying to publish them elsewhere
is not a great mix. Otherwise, I would probably have posted a lot more of them. That first 20 line effort
that seemed to get things back in gear is still one of my stronger efforts, but most of sonnets from earlier
on in that period aren't nearly as good as I thought they were at the time, though some I've been able to
revise effectively, as I'm sure I will try with some others. Some of them also work better in sequences
than by themselves, but I'm not too worried about it since my writing of poetry not only seems not to have
slowed down but also to have improved and diversified beyond sonnets. I'm quite fond, now, of a few of my
sestina related efforts.