The Child Within

DEAR READER Poetry is a very personal thing and so much of what we get from it depends on what we bring to it, from our own life experience. Each poem may convey many meanings to different people. Many books of poetry have been published and much has been written about the craft of writing poetry. Most writers when discussing the writing of poetry, deal with the subject almost exclusively as a technical craft, an abstract art form. This approach depersonalizes poetry and limits such work to “how to” technique. This reduces poetry to mere abstraction, just so many dead words, lines, and stanzas on so many lifeless pages. In this collection, I attempt to explore and portray specifically some of the many facets of the individual poets’ role, as well as what I view to be the purpose and thrust of poetry in general. This work is an effort on my part to try a far different approach toward poetry; to attempt to personalize poetry by merging the craft of writing a poem, to the poem itself. Thus the techniques of writing poetry joins with the poem itself, and this merger makes them inseparable--- they become one. The poem now takes on a distinct personality all its’ own. In the words of Robert Frost, it now becomes “a living thing…” When this happens, “the poem and I” may take a walk together; “the wind is a poet”; and “each face I see is a poem to me…” Poetry may be viewed as a marriage wherein words are wedded to thoughts. Seen in this light, the poet becomes a matchmaker, his main task being to find the right word to match the right thought. The product of all his labor, the poem, is a marriage of word and thought.