Welcome To My Poetry Corner

I have been writing poetry since the age of 15. At that tender age, it was all that I wanted to do with my life, to write poetry. My world revolved around writing poetry and songs about love, politics, the environment, spiritualism, and family.

When I was 19, living in Vancouver, I used to sit at my manual typewriter and dream of some day actually being paid to write. It didn't matter much to me what I got paid to write...all I wanted from this life was to be a writer. It was a calling. I had from that early age a love of the written word and eventually I would make a carreer from technical and business writing. However, poetry remains a great passion of mine.

There were many times when I would invite my friends over for readings and they would sit in the basement of my home and drink and smoke and play music and I would give poetry readings.

In my 1974 high school yearbook, there are poems that I had written. After high school, I organized a poetry club at Brock University and my writing was heavily influenced by international poets like W.H. Auden, A.E. Housman and T.S. Eliot and Canadian poets like Al Purdy, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen and Alden Nowlan.

Brock University is where I met other student poets like Laurence Steven (now English Department Head, Laurentian University) and Jon Rowland, whose portraits can be found in my collection to this day.

All of us in the poetry club edited the university poetry quarterly "The Augur". My writing style started to resemble song lyrics. This is because I was influenced by the music and lyrics of Tom Waits and Joni Mitchell, two of the most original poets of modern music.

My poetry from time to time switches from rhymed poetry to blank (blank verse is an unrhymed poem written using a set metrical pattern) and free verse (free verse is based on the irregular rhythmic CADENCE or the recurrence, with variations, of phrases, images, and syntactical patterns rather than the conventional use of METER. RHYME may or may not be present in free verse, but when it is, it is used with great freedom). I like the rhyme of words, although it is not so popular a technique any longer. So much of rhymed poetry suffers from "rhyme dictation" where the rhyme takes precedent over the meaning. The other hurdle to be overcome with rhymed poetry is to allow the sense not to end at the end of the line but continue into the next line. This steals away the weight of rhyme from the end of the line

Still I like to write free verse with a sense of rhyme. You can see this happening in "Traveling With Irene" which I think is my favorite work.

I have not been published very much over the years. I have seen a few pop up here and there in Canadian poetry journals but nothing major. It seems that I go many years without writing and then the poems come to me and I write them down. Usually, my inner page is bare, and then something comes from somewhere and I just listen to that inner voice and write down what it says. It is an internal process. I think all creativity happens that way. Yes, there is manufacturing involved but it is all inspired by some force I cannot describe.

For this collection, I added graphics that I found on the internet, through Google Image searches. I have tried to select graphics that I feel add to the main theme of each poem. They are not intended to define the work as much as to compliment the work.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy these poems.

If you have any comments about my poetry, I would be glad to hear from you. Write to me at rwh@rogers.com