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| A Poet's Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet, Ekstasis Editions, 2019 |
Reg Skinner was my mentor and friend for many years. Our initial connection was a shared interest in the writings of J. Krishnamurti, but we also discussed other things. From 1974, when I first met “RR” (Reginald Rice) Skinner, to the mid-1990s, when he died in his late eighties, we corresponded on an almost monthly basis; during this time I also visited RR at his home, first at “Boisville,” near Camberley, and then later at Felpham, near Bognor Regis, both in England. I heard RR’s life story in considerable detail, and I also learned something of spirituality, healing, dowsing, and bee keeping from him. It was not uncommon that we would sit for ten hours and he would talk about his life and what he called “things appertaining” which referred to a spiritual and psychological understanding life. Knowing RR has been a blessing in my life, one for which I am deeply grateful.
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Being a part of a community of poets is a wonderful thing, especially when you are young. In a group, it is not necessary to write poems that are similar to someone else’s poems; to be creative is to write from your own soul and inner being. The important thing is that poets in a community respect each other. My community, when I was young, was other young poets; later we were known collectively as The Vehicule Poets. There were other poets I knew as well, and all of my poet friends from when I was young have a special place in my heart.
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A community of poets includes the elder poets, people we respect for their dedication to writing and for the body of work they have created. It is the work of young poets to know the tradition they are working in and to respect the older poets. But older poets must also mentor younger poets. It is a wonderful experience to receive the “blessing” of the older poets we grew up reading; I have had this experience and it sustained me for many years—even now I am thankful for the kindness, affirmation, and teaching I received when I was young from poets who were older, wiser, and more mature than I was at the time. Louis Dudek and George Johnston were especially kind and helpful to me.
__________________________
Poets can be insurance salesmen, janitors, lawyers, teachers, unemployed, or unemployable and on welfare, but these are jobs of convenience or of necessity to survive. The commitment of a poet is to writing poems, and this requires vision, dedication, single-mindedness, and determination in order to do the work the poet was born to do.
__________________________
Soon after I married for the first time, I knew that the marriage was something to be endured. I lived a dis-spirited existence, not a life-affirming and expansive one, just as I had before the marriage. Then, in my thirties, I didn’t write much poetry at all and what I wrote I didn’t like; that was why I turned my attention to writing book reviews. Much of the poetry I managed to write reflected my spiritual emptiness and unhappiness. These poems were not an expression of the Temenos that is entered when the poet is in touch with Spirit. I am not blaming the marriage for this; I take responsibility for the mistakes I have made in my life and in my first marriage. I was dis-spirited before the marriage, and the marriage itself only emphasized my emotional and spiritual condition.
__________________________
In the 1990s, I wrote “The Shadow Trilogy” (The Compass, 1993; The Yoni Rocks 1995; The Mystic Beast, 1997), books that came from an awareness of the shadow aspect of the human soul. The shadow is an important archetype in Jungian psychology; it is made up of what we reject in ourselves and project onto other people. “Owning one’s shadow” refers to being aware of one’s dark side, being responsible for one’s psychology instead of projecting its negative aspects onto other people, and examining one’s life. Writing these three books was an important journey for me, it was a time when I tried to make sense of the first half of my life.
__________________________
Being a part of a community of poets is a wonderful thing, especially when you are young. In a group, it is not necessary to write poems that are similar to someone else’s poems; to be creative is to write from your own soul and inner being. The important thing is that poets in a community respect each other. My community, when I was young, was other young poets; later we were known collectively as The Vehicule Poets. There were other poets I knew as well, and all of my poet friends from when I was young have a special place in my heart.
__________________________
A community of poets includes the elder poets, people we respect for their dedication to writing and for the body of work they have created. It is the work of young poets to know the tradition they are working in and to respect the older poets. But older poets must also mentor younger poets. It is a wonderful experience to receive the “blessing” of the older poets we grew up reading; I have had this experience and it sustained me for many years—even now I am thankful for the kindness, affirmation, and teaching I received when I was young from poets who were older, wiser, and more mature than I was at the time. Louis Dudek and George Johnston were especially kind and helpful to me.
__________________________
Poets can be insurance salesmen, janitors, lawyers, teachers, unemployed, or unemployable and on welfare, but these are jobs of convenience or of necessity to survive. The commitment of a poet is to writing poems, and this requires vision, dedication, single-mindedness, and determination in order to do the work the poet was born to do.
__________________________
Soon after I married for the first time, I knew that the marriage was something to be endured. I lived a dis-spirited existence, not a life-affirming and expansive one, just as I had before the marriage. Then, in my thirties, I didn’t write much poetry at all and what I wrote I didn’t like; that was why I turned my attention to writing book reviews. Much of the poetry I managed to write reflected my spiritual emptiness and unhappiness. These poems were not an expression of the Temenos that is entered when the poet is in touch with Spirit. I am not blaming the marriage for this; I take responsibility for the mistakes I have made in my life and in my first marriage. I was dis-spirited before the marriage, and the marriage itself only emphasized my emotional and spiritual condition.
__________________________
In the 1990s, I wrote “The Shadow Trilogy” (The Compass, 1993; The Yoni Rocks 1995; The Mystic Beast, 1997), books that came from an awareness of the shadow aspect of the human soul. The shadow is an important archetype in Jungian psychology; it is made up of what we reject in ourselves and project onto other people. “Owning one’s shadow” refers to being aware of one’s dark side, being responsible for one’s psychology instead of projecting its negative aspects onto other people, and examining one’s life. Writing these three books was an important journey for me, it was a time when I tried to make sense of the first half of my life.
__________________________
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