Lessons Learned & Unlearned

Most of the poems in this collection, written over a period of nearly sixty years, reflect many things I have been taught and that I have gone on to test, either through experience or imagination. They represent not only lessons I have learned over the years, but also those I have not.

In many of the poems you are about to read, I have followed the advice of Sir Philip Sidney: "Look into your heart and write." In many more, I was just messing around with language, engaging in wordplay but, as Frost once noted, "play for mortal stakes." There are a number of "found poems" and centos in this collection, occasioned by my "stealing" and juggling words of other writers. There's an acrostic, a few anagrams, dictionary poems, shaped poems, and ekphrastic poems inspired by works of art. And there are poems constrained by fixed forms: haiku, tankas, sonnets, villanelles, even a golden shovel.

While some of my work represents Wordsworth's "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," just as much of it reveals what H.L. Mencken called the "joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident." I thank you in advance for reading my work and hope every reader finds in this volume some lines that resonate.