What's New?

9/17/09

I haven't maintained this blog for years now. It remains as the container of my book of poems, What the Road Can Afford. I have removed the essays and other prose, as I feel they are no longer relevant to my current work and thinking.

As soon as I find the time, I will be starting a blog at www.uselessscience.com/blog that deals with the work in Jungian psychology I have been pursuing over the last few years or so. Many of my works-in-progress on that topic can be found at the Useless Science forum.

Although I no longer write or read poetry, I must admit that the poems in What the Road Can Afford still provide me with a surprising feeling of satisfaction. I can still say now (4 to 12 years after they were written) that they have managed to be everything I wanted them to be . . . and more. And I expect to remain as satisfied with them 10 or 20 years from now as I am currently.

I'm not making any kind of claim to their greatness as poetry. They are solid enough and have occasional flairs, but beyond that, I can't say . . . and find myself not terribly concerned. But as one who has repeatedly removed writing from this blog within a year or two of posting it, to remain satisfied with these poems even for a decade is significant.

I suspect this is due to the feeling I've always had that these poems were somehow not written by me . . . but rather to me. Their author is some "familiar other" who stepped inside my personality and pranced about, stomping out a dance that has rendered meaningful my small life and person. I have learned and continue to learn enormously from these poems . . . and it is that bounty which drives me to feel such respect and admiration for them.

They are not "youthful musings", nor is my fondness for them really sentimental. I find myself grateful for having been touched by these poems and the process of creating them (and being created by them). I harbor no more hope or concern that these poems can be as generous to others as they have been to me. They may be merely a surreal love song to my most unlovable self . . . from precisely where or who or what, I can't say. Maybe they speak a special language only I can understand.

In my retirement from poetry, that is one of many things I have come to accept. Of course, in leaving these poems publicly viewable, perhaps I am holding out some hope of their value for those other than myself. And so, perhaps, I was not being entirely honest above. In fact, I feel both ways. Both hopeful that they will mean something to other people and completely content with all they have given me. I couldn't ask any more of them . . . but if they have a life of their own (as it feels to me), then I have no right to lock them away. Let them do what they want . . . and if they want to do nothing, then they are still my small secret, my private touchstone, the place I go when I am lost.

But here you are also welcome to get lost or to find whatever you would seek.