Reflections

Writing poetry is reliving pieces of lives you have chosen at various focused times. From John Ciardi's HOW DOES A POEM MEAN?: "Any good work of art is beautiful and, in one sense, beauty is mysterious to us in that it can move us more deeply than we know how to say. All deeply felt states of being, moreover, involve ambiguities. But if our sense of beauty is mysterious to us, there is not much that is mysterious about the techniques a good artist uses to create that sense of beauty." Write and explore. Keep a record, expressing experiences and ideas. A line or two about the forest where you played in your youth in the Black Hills, a '53 Ford you drove to a drive-in movie, working summer jobs to pay for the college years, having a few beers at the Old Style in Deadwood. I got lucky during the Viet Nam War. Signed up in the U.S. Navy to avoid the draft. The first three years at the VIP Motor Pool near Pearl Harbor, I drove for notables like General William Westmoreland, Senator John Tower, and my favorite novelist, John Steinbeck. Talks about small towns and local folks. And the G.I. Bill was still available. Off to grad school and Teacher Corps in Buffalo, New York, working with some fine poor folks in intercity Lackawanna, just downwind from Bethlehem Steel. Then Peace Corps Afghanistan, Kenya and traveling on around the world to the Seychelles, India, Kashmir, Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Korea, Japan, and Hawaii, exploring new cultures and languages. Pursuing the curiosity. I lived in and loved the cities but escaped back to the clean country where I kept notebooks an journals over the years. Even taught some writing as I pursued my own while teaching on the Wind River Indian Reservation in west central Wyoming. Played some jazz and blues for a few more connections to my reading library. Yesterday, I hooked an old brown trout in the stream out behind mi casa near the mountains. And wandered again through the poetry notebooks, collectin