Deletions from an Introduction for a Selected Poems

 

Deletions:

3.  You don’t become a poet expecting to be liked for everything you write, or even for some of what you write. Why do people become poets? It is simple: people become poets because they are called to this work; writing poetry is an act of transcription, writing down what is given to you and, most importantly, writing poetry is to feel that truth is so important that it must be adhered to. This is why freedom of speech is so important; it is essential if literature is to have any meaning or relevance for either the poet or the reader.

4. Poetry isn't antiseptic, it's passion for life. Poetry is love and death and tears of joy and tears of sorrow. It's messy, it's stuff we don't want to talk about, it's betrayal and jealousy, it's love and sex and tenderness and grief and regret and awe and divine inspiration; it's the shadow falling across one's life. Poetry is nothing if not passionate; passion, not the intellect, not fashion, not popularity, not what other people are doing, defines poetry.

5.  In The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry (2022), I described how one's life can be reconfigured to something totally different from what one expected in life; I described this as the Great Reconfiguration. When I was six years old and my father died my old life became redundant, everything changed; I was one person and then I became someone else. His death has preoccupied much of my life, his passing reconfigured my life; this began the relentless journey of grief and understanding, love and loss, that I've been on, and trying to understand this existence and expressing it in poems.

6. To write not parts of a life but a whole life, that is what I have tried to do; it is an impossible task and can be attempted only if one refers to archetypes and a mythological approach to experience as a way to communicate this information. The poet's body of work is all of a piece, a single entity; it's a life that is transformed by poetry, it's the soul speaking through the poet. For John Keats life was a vale of soul-making, not a vale of tears; this was always the direction of my writing, my concern has always been with soul-making and I expressed this in my poems.