So what is it all about ?

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there"

(from "The Go-Between" by L.P.Hartley)

Many many years ago I needed some way to process all the stuff that was going on in my life. For some reason I found writing it down as prose very difficult as it just ended up feeling cliche, pretentious and flat. So I turned to poetry. The poetry collected here was written as a form of stress relief or self-reflection. There were a few people who got to see them - some of whom were even nice to make encouraging noises about them. But that is as far as it went. And yes it is probably still cliche and pretentious and not any good. But here goes....

For various reasons I am have a bit of a nostalgia thing going on right now, and things have changed since these were written. Self-publishing is much easier, but you don't even need to go that far. So I decided to try a bit of a personal challenge and start adding some of those old attempts at poetry to a blog...a travel through the foreign country that is my own past.

The subject matter is fairly predictable - lust, love, loss. I'm not going to upload them all - there is a fair amount of predictable "teenage" (and early twenties) angst in there which really doesn't need repeating.

Welcome and I hope you enjoy.

Where I can., I will try and add a rough date for the original poem. Given how long ago this all was, the dates will hopefully not do anything other than put them in order ! (no names, no pack drill)

Muriel Rukeyser: "Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry."

Updated to add another quote:

“A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”

― Robert Frost