In The Present

I can’t claim to be a good judge of my own poetry, at least not in the present and not very often. Since it’s mine, I love almost everything I write when it’s current, but Time is the real judge, even if it’s still just my opinion. If I find a poem that’s many years old, that I can barely remember the process of writing, and that I still like, then THAT’S the sonofabitch that I know was pretty well written and it makes me feel good that no one bothered to kill me before I could write it! (I may not be the Ultimate Egotist, but he/she doesn’t live very far from here!) Since last year, I’ve written more poems in a short span of time than ever in my life—at least a hundred poems so far when most years or even most decades since the ‘70’s, I never produced that many. Sometimes I’ve been so tongue-tied that I only produced 4 poems in a year or 10 poems in a decade. For one decade, at least, I have the excuse that I’d taken up writing short stories instead. At times I realized that there had been whole decades where no one I knew at work or play, except for old friends, even knew that I wrote. I guess I didn’t care if any of them knew. As a perpetual elitist, maybe I thought that they wouldn’t know what to care about if they knew. Though I like many of my new poems very much, it’s hard to know, once again, if they’re really good or if they simply please me in the present. To please myself is probably the only reason I write, so I guess things are working out. p.s. Some people wish some of my poems were more cheerful, and so do I—but it isn’t very often true of me, so I don’t try to write it. I used to have a greater sense of comedy in some of my writing, and I miss that, I admit.