my poetry

As one of my previous entries indicates, I have been doing a lot of thinking about who I am and what I am doing with my life. Over the past few years I have largely not been writing. From time to time during that period I have thought I was through the writer's block and celebrated a single work as a come back only to return to rarely picking up a pen and writing drivel when I did so.

Some serendipitous events recently brought me back to the pen. About a month ago changes at work had me wondering about the course of my career there (the restack, which I later came to terms with). I realized my life balance between work and writing had shifted so much that work was all I had. In the past both work and writing were significant parts in my life. If there was a dark cloud in one, I could step out from under it into the other. This helped me have a good attitude in both places in the past. But without writing, I was left in the rain.

Then, I saw Il Postino for the first time. Years ago I would have imagined myself as Neruda hoping to someday reach his stature, but I found I related to Mario and was envious of his ability to express the beauty in his small town. (I must admit that I was influenced by knowing the real life story of Massimo Troisi which was revealed in the DVD special features.) Finding my aspirations relating to Mario instead of Neruda reminded me how a high school English teacher said he found that as time went on when he read Jean Anouilh's Antigone he related more to Creon than Antigone. Still, what was important for my writing was that I saw the story of writing igniting the flame of life in someone at a time when I sought to stir the smoldering ashes in my writing life.

I realized that though I had always wanted to be a famous and critically acclaimed poet that maybe I could just be me. I could write without amazing ambition. Maybe I could just write for the poem and not for me. I was lucky enough to have a conversation some years back with David Amram (he did the music for one of Art House's productions plays) and he told me something that makes more and more sense to me as a life lesson: loose yourself in what you do, do what is best for the project, become part of what the group creates.

These realizations led me to pick up the pen now again and actually produce a few pieces that I could consider sharing. As I mentioned previously, I had tried to write a few times recently but maybe my aspirations blunted me, but whatever the case what I produced were just a collection of words on the paper, nothing worth repeating. However one night's insomnia led to my composing and the success of that writing led me to picking up the pen again.

A few days later I went to see a friend's one person play. To see an artist delve into a new medium (it was her first time acting per se) with such success was inspiring. Afterwords a mutual friend encouraged me to read at the next Art House open mic and I returned to the mic a couple days later.

But there was one more realization to be had. All these year's I had been saving my poems for The Collected Works of Bill Rood but now I was resigned to write for the poem's sake and not my fame. So I realized I might as well put the poems up on my blog and not keep them caged up at home--let them out to meet new people. After all, this is about them not me.

I've decided to try to publish a poem a week on this blog. In keeping with my new thoughts on it being about the work and not me (again inspired by David Amram) I decided to publish with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. I'll schedule them to post on Mondays at 7 PM EST. I have two new works scheduled and if I am unable to come up with new ones I will present older ones.

One thing to realize about my poetry is that typically I write for performance, so some of the conventions on the page are meant more to guide my performance. Also, another quirk is that I write at the end of the poems where I have performed them and when. I've always tried to not reread a poem at the same reading so back when I was active this became a necessary convention.

So what's left is for me to be me and compose little written creations. I hope you enjoy.