problogue

There is a sense of tangibility born in all the poems in Scenes the Writer Shows.   They convey my travels or are based on incidents in my life.  They examine the lives of those close to me and interpret what they experience and how I was affected.  I attempt to bring the reader as close as I can to sharing the experience with me.  Through use of musical rhythms and sensory details I hope my poems create spaces of my time to which the reader can relate.

            From the sun swept fjords of Norway to the urban streets of downtown Minneapolis I’ve recorded experiences.  Some taught lessons and others were merely observations.  In Scenes the Writer Shows the reader travels with someone who tests people. In my life I have often “pushed the envelope” and taken the less gilded paths that weren’t handicapped accessible.   Most of the forty-one poems are written from the perspective of someone with a disability.

In “The Hustler,” for instance, lines are crossed, doorways are shadowed and places are briefly visited.  The protagonist is left looking for those trains that would not go where he wanted.  The poem is a summation of my years in the 90’s living in a neighborhood declared a “Drug-free zone” in Minneapolis.  It may seem embellished and playful, but accurately reflects my thoughts, or perceptions of others’ thoughts, at that time in my life.  The poem reveals how being disabled has touched me through others in various venues and vistas of urban street life.

 

My book attempts to emulate the feelings that follow me.  In “Humility’s Clown” words are taken from an actual conversation I had.  It is light-hearted and sometimes sarcastic.  My poems try to describe reactions I often get for things that do not fit the stereotype of the disabled.

Poetry is a disguise.  Often it is cathartic and self-serving and offers little surprise.  To that end, a poem is a chance for a metaphor or simply a simile with which we play.  In Scenes I have revealed the deepest and sometimes most disparaging things I’ve seen or heard.  It is either me, or a disillusioned figment of me, baring my soul.  The poems never point fingers; they just accept that life often has nothing affirming to say.  My book is filled with transcripts of the places I’ve been; filled with happy moments of life with light sprinkles of situations from which I’ve emerged scarred.  I trust the reader will decipher which is which.  They will be able to distinguish, with salient resonance, the positive experiences I’ve had from the negative.  They will know which stories are and which are dissertations, which yielded knowledge and fascination and which yielded seeds for self-loathing.

It is my sincerest wish that this book will entertain the reader as I intended.  The poems, in their rarest instinct, are merely banal slices of life.  That’s where metrical cadence and lingual play come rushing to snatch words from mediocrity.  I believe that is what good poetry should do.  Enjoy.




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