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That perfect moment ...

9/25/2020

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“Opportunities are like sunrises. If you wait too long, you miss them.”  So said inspirational author, columnist, and poet, William Arthur Ward, who penned many influential inspirational maxims.

There are those scant few moments in the wee hours when an idea, phrase, or needful rhyme will pop up and hover in the ether of my too, too sleepy brain, and I think, “I’ll jot it down in the morning.”

But, when morning comes, “whatever it was” has vanished, leaving not a trace of itself behind, and there is nothing that I can do to jog it back into being.  Such missed opportunities can be rather painful.

 They leave me with the certainty that I have just lost out on a most brilliant and extraordinary morsel, and this can nag at me for hours and hours.  “You should have written it down!” my muse chides.

Some nights, just as I am on the very verge of succumbing to sleep, I will very reluctantly get up, snatch my nearby pen and pad, jot the idea down, and gratefully climb back into bed.

The next morning I might find an illegible scrawl waiting for me on my notepad, or it might even be clear enough to read but leave me wondering, “What in the world was I thinking about last night?”

It seems that my muse loves to set me up with a choice between two tortures, both involving some version of amnesia and a keen sense of loss.  But, there is a reason why this matters so much to me.

On those rare evenings and very early mornings when my muse prods me insistently to get up and write, I find the idea and the effort are well worth the trouble, which makes the fruitless nights worse.

Fortunately, I am not regularly afflicted by these ill timed bouts with my muse, but that pad and pen are always at the ready, even when I am not, because I may actually compose something epic, after midnight.

Image (above) provided by my gracious friend, Finnigan Livingstone.


As noted previously, My Echoes E-books are available, in rotation, FREE for download each saturday.  This week’s offering is Echoes lll, Even More Neo-Victorian Poetry, and is FREE for download on Saturday, September 26, 2020.  Click here to go to the amazon.com link.
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Poet in hiding ...

9/19/2020

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“To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.”  So wrote Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde in his preface to The Picture Of Dorian Grey.

I once had an opportunity to share my poetry anonymously in a college creative writing class.  Our instructor, who had allowed me this little experiment during the majority of that semester, was awesome.

He would read us wonderful, published poetry which we would discuss afterward.  Now and then one of our own poems would be introduced, read aloud, and the class would discuss it, also.

I was positively brilliant!  My poems were appraised with unobstructed honesty and candor.  I got to hear what they actually thought of my pieces.  Their feedback was the best I’ve ever experienced. 

However, after several months of me hiding in plain sight, our instructor approached me to say, “You know, this isn’t exactly fair.  How about we let them know who wrote those unidentified poems?”

With some reluctance I agreed.  After all, this had been a virtual trove of gold for me, but I did see his point.  

During our next class session we discussed the anonymous poems that had been shared, and then our instructor suddenly piped up with, “How about we hear from the poet who wrote those pieces.”

Heads began spinning about scanning the room in utter confusion.  There was no one new in the room, and certainly not a published poet.  I hesitated ever so briefly before I said,”That was my work.”

The shock which reverberated in that classroom was palpable, and I felt a bit embarrassed, but I was also very grateful for the experience.  After all, how often does one get  to hide behind ones own art?

By the way … my second E-book, Echoes ll, More Neo-Victorian Poetry, is once again FREE for download … today (9/19/2020)!!!  Click here to get it!
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Any road will do ...

9/5/2020

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Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, author of Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, and Through The Looking-Glass, famously known as Lewis Carroll, said, “If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

Being serendipitous by nature, I’ve never really tried to figure where I was going.  Instead, I’ve always lived a “put one foot in front of the other and repeat” sort of life, which has gotten me this far, so far.

No one in my childhood blue collar neighborhood seemed the least bit interested in poetry, and I never had any expectations that my poems would ever matter to anyone, but that didn’t hinder me.  I kept writing.

When I was eleven years old I fell into writing rhyming metered verse, much like someone falling into the deep end of a swimming pool and suddenly realizing that they could swim, even though they’d had no lessons.

During my first fifty years of composing poetry I never once considered publishing my pieces in book form.  It was my daughter’s idea to publish them after she had published her own first novel, Clockwork Twist, Waking.

To date, we have five books of my poetry in print, and I am currently working on another volume of my work.  I still don’t know where I’m going, but I’m pretty happy with where I am, and I love surprises.

Today, my E-book Echoes lll, Even More Neo-Victorian Poetry is FREE for download on Amazon.com.  You can get a copy by clicking here.

Enjoy!
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    About the author:

    I've written many poems over the years.  This blog is a preview of my books: Echoes, Neo-Victorian Poetry (April 2013), Echoes ll, More Neo-Victorian Poetry (May 2014), Echoes lll, Even More Neo-Victorian Poetry, (August 2016), A Compilation of Echoes. (September 2016), and When None Command (April 13, 2019)

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