Poems for Peg (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

My dear Peg,

Today I am presenting to you a book of poetry--an original book of poems I’ve written over the course of my lifetime that I’ve taken the trouble to organize and edit especially for you.

This book does not include every poem I have ever written—I don’t think you, or anyone should suffer such an affliction. The majority of poems I’ve written are unpalatable tripe, so I’ve spent the last few years selecting and editing my poems in order to proffer what I consider to be my better compositions. Of course, as the author of these verses I have no legitimate means of assessing their actual merit, so it is highly probable that anyone with sound judgment or good taste would find even these selected poems to be essentially moronic. Hence I present these poems to you with significant trepidation. As you read through these verses be guided by the fact that it is only because of my affection for you that I have undertaken this project in the first place, hoping that your affection for me will temper your criticism of what I now place before you.

Let me take a moment to provide some personal history relating to the compiling of these poems.

I have been writing poems and verses since my youth, at least since high school, perhaps even earlier, and what is collected here represents poems written over a period of more than thirty years. I wrote a lot of poems during those thirty years; however I was rather careless with the original manuscripts, stuffing them here and there, and in the course of all the moves and changes I’ve made throughout my life many were discarded and tossed away. Still, what remained of these jottings turned out to be more than I expected.

Some years ago, after I obtained a computer and became familiar with the wonders of word processing, I began to type several poems I had at home into computer files and saved them on floppy discs. Later they were transferred to hard floppies, rewritable CDs, and most currently to USB storage devices. I imagined that I had pretty much transferred all my salvaged original manuscripts of poems to the computer files, and I intended some day to simply reformat those poems into some presentable document representing a complete survey my poetic efforts.

However, when I retired I discovered that I had accumulated at least a few hundred more handwritten poems in a locked desk drawer in my office. You see, while I was working I occasionally would take a break from writing legal briefs and compose some verse or two that I would then tuck away into that desk drawer. Upon retiring from my law firm, in the process of cleaning out my office, I reclaimed all these manuscripts. For some inexplicable reason I brought these “desk drawer” poems down to my winter home in Florida. These “desk drawer” poems are ones that I started reviewing and editing during idle months in Florida, the unidentified “project” I evasively would tell you I was working on while away, intending to add them to the others already typed into my home computer.

After I finished joining these desk drawer poems to the earlier processed verses in a computerized file I felt ready to plunge ahead to start preparing this book of poems. But I was curious about locating the original manuscripts for the poems previously processed and in searching my house I came upon a large box that had accompanied me, unopened, through my many changes of residence. Inside this box I discovered hundreds of additional poems long before written, but also long forgotten, and I set about reviewing and editing these boxed poems as well. In the end I entered approximately 1500 of my poems into the overworked circuits of my computer’s memory. To be fair, some of these poems do not deserve that appellation as they are merely brief couplets or simple verses of no consequence. And this total includes some dreadful limericks and juvenile word play too embarrassingly trivial to be preserved, let alone shared. And I discovered that a few poems were duplicates, or later edited versions, of poems I had previously composed. Still, all in all, even taking these deductions into account, I found I had undertaken a much greater task than I anticipated as there were more than a thousand potential poems to sort through in putting this book of poetry together for you.

This is likely more information than you need to be bothered about, but I feel some obligation to explain why it has taken me so long to share these poems with you. Quite honestly, it was never my intention to share these poems with anyone. It was long my fantasy that these poems would lie fallow somewhere among my possessions only to be discovered after I died, at which time, I hoped, some thoughtful heir might posthumously publish them. As you will see, many of these poems are extremely personal--several contain insights into my deepest thoughts and many evolved out of bleak moments of my life; many are maudlin, brooding, self pitying and supercilious. One of the difficulties I encountered in preparing this book is that some of these poems forced me to relive incidents, and revisit relationships in my life, that were far from pleasant. And in sharing these poems I reveal a private and a personal history containing many unflattering and distressing episodes. Still, the majority, I believe, are harmless and merit your consideration.

After the musical artist Prince died I read an article mentioning that he had left behind manuscripts of hundreds of songs that he had never published, and no directions as to their disposition, leaving his heirs to fight about their fate. The article questioned whether it would honor him or diminish him, as an artist, to publish these additional songs he may have deemed of poorer quality. Reading about his death and his unpublished work was one of the things that prompted me to begin this task. Among my poems are a lot of shoddy ones I wouldn’t want you or anyone else to waste their time reading. The ones gathered here are the better ones I wish to share.

Or consider the fate of Emily Dickinson. She wrote more than 1700 poems, but only handfuls were published in her lifetime. She never took the time to edit her poems for publication, never bothered to give her poems titles by which they could be identified, never attempted to sort out her poems thematically or to discriminate between those she felt were most meaningful to her and those she suspected were trivial, and left the world to guess the context and reasons for what she had written. Annually she haphazardly bundled her year’s worth of poems together in a packet tied with cord and laid them aside. When she died her sister recovered these retained bundles of verses and somehow they came into the possession of Harvard University where, decades later, they were fortunately resurrected for publication. Today we have the gift of her 1700 plus poems, but, to be honest, this exhaustive body of work, I believe, is diminished, rather than enhanced, by their bulk, the lack of discrimination and the absence of editing. Her best and better verses are camouflaged and depreciated by being scattered among the hundreds of minor and petty poems published in her complete works, and the absence of context and of titles is infuriating. I mean, what sense is to be made from an assertion that “I found verse 327 emotionally moving, but frankly consider verse 1510 to be derivative.” There is a narrowness of themes in her poetry and much repetition, probably because her own interests seemed to be confined to her immediate surroundings and especially her garden. She wrote an awful lot of poems about bees, and flowers and birds and clouds—and death. She wrote a lot about death, in a disturbingly pleasant and lighthearted way. (“Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me.”) I decided, late in life, that I did not want to leave my poems is such a muddled state as sweet Emily did, and, besides, my sister is as like to throw them out with the trash.

Now don’t get me wrong—I am hardly in the category of Prince or Dickinson, nor anything near to being labeled an “artist”, but I do feel that in many ways these simple poems of mine, even if they are mostly drivel, are my only legacy, the only extant evidence that I once walked upon this earth, and loved, and felt heartbreak, and laughed, and occasionally had deep thoughts on serious subjects. I have no direct heirs, save for my sister and her descendants, and I have become fearful that once I am gone these poems will be ignored, forgotten or simply discarded. So I have determined that before that occurs I would at least take the trouble to sort through my hundreds of poems and find ones I feel, without shame, can be shared with you, the final and best love of my life.

I know there is a great risk here. These poems may reveal things about me that might best remain suppressed and hidden. Some reveal my secret thoughts. The saving grace, I hope, is that these verses all relate to a life I lived many years ago. All these poems were written in a very different stage of my life, when writing poetry was my way of coping with the absence of someone like you being a part of my life.

In preparing this book I have struggled trying to recall the incidents, the events, the circumstances and the feelings from distant times that inspired me to write these poems. Sometimes I could. But often I could not. And sometimes I was surprised by what I found hidden in the memories stirred up by a few of these poems.

Because these poems span a period of more than...