Regarding the Poems

 Thank you for reading the poems!

I've gone back and edited the poems on this blog all the way through 2021.  It was an exhausting cerebral task that took up most of my summer.  However, I'm glad to have done it, for now the poems are much better.  I'm going to start chipping away at 2020, but the fall is a busier time with two classes to teach.

I'd like to believe some of my poems have approached excellence.  I've been at it since I was 16 years old.  And yet I've learned that I cannot be the judge.  Very often I think a poem is 'great' and yet when I come back to it later, my opinion radically shifts.  I live in a constant storm of editing, doubt and, as well, passionate engagement with my muses.  I can only hope my constant work and fervor, embroiled in the chaos of uncertainty and randomness, has some hidden, laudable approach.

As it stands, I will never know.  I may start submitting poems to journals once more, but then again maybe not.  The need for recognition isn't as important or even desperate for me as it was before.  Who knows why.  I perhaps live for my muses now, who I see as greater than me and perhaps as beings beyond me entirely.  Maybe I'm just tired and misanthropic; and see humans, including myself, with too much honesty to stomach public rituals beyond what I already must.

Owl    

PS:

Regarding the political situation, the world hangs on what happens in the US election in November.

"If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher" -- Abraham Lincoln

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