We all have poetry in us, and we all have those poetic moments which push us ever so slightly closer to that which cannot be bounded by the human word. Our poetry leads us toward the ineffable.
I used to be a young poet. Now I am an old poet. I wrote The Opposite Shore no later than 1963. That was sixty-one years ago. I still read it. I still read all of my poetry because it gives me an experience like nothing else can. Poetry is layered like no other form of literature, and these layers interact with each other and sometimes exchange places within the hierarchy of layers, and we are transported. This is an experience that is just as real as any that a thinker can summon through philosophical analysis, and it is just flat out more fun getting there through poetry.
Sometimes a poem doesn’t make sense. It just works. I don’t know what else to say about that. You’ll probably hit a couple of those in this selection. And honestly, they may not work on you the way they work on me. But I hope they do.
I have used some of these poems as passages in Homo, which is included in my novel Sanctified, and since I see it as a long poem itself that is a major part of my work, I include it in this selection. Yes, you can reuse poems. Over and over. They are linguistic, spiritual, experiential building blocks. Nobody can tell you or me what we can do with them.
Joe