Contact Me
Email: bawriting@earthlink.netPhone: 562 628-9688
Get My RSS FeedI like to think that I write passable poetry. I read a lot of The World’s Great Poetry in graduate school and totally understand that I’m not Shakespeare or Donne or Milton. (Not even Dryden or Shadwell.) (Joke for English majors.)
But the modern free verse I write isn’t too bad. I work with the rhythms of speech and the sounds of words. When I try to write rhymed and metered poetry, though, well ... you see what I come up with when you read the parody invocations and songs in Finding New Goddesses. That poetry is bad on purpose, whereas my better stuff is carefully worked and reworked. What no one will ever, ever, ever see, however, are the limericks I once traded with one of the authors whose novel I edited.
Although my son Charles (a published poet) refers to me as a “guerrilla poet” who has to put my poetry in my own books because no one else will publish it, some of my poems have, in fact, been anthologized. My first published poem (something totally forgettable about metaphysical love) appeared in Science of Mind Magazine in 1980. I was thrilled at the time. Other poems have appeared in The Isis Papers (1995), an anthology called Oxymoron (1997), and on a (now defunct) web site called Pegasus Dreaming. Three of my poems also appear in The Pagan’s Muse, edited by Jane Raeburn (Kensington, 2003).
Here are three of my favorites of the poems I've written. I think I'll come back from time to time and change or add poems.