generally i find poems just drop into mind complete and i have to recognise that it was an ok poem and quickly write it down before i forget and i am very careful not to change the original wording which i always find was the best


the main problem is remembering accurately what popped into mind so to speak


the poems are a sort of fruition of some things i have been thinking about for a while coupled with imagery i have been visually absorbed in


sometimes it can take me six months to a year or even years to understand a poem i have written


the first poem i ever wrote is one of my best and i just sat down and thought what would i like to do since i was sick of work and the crap of life and then i though i would like to write poetry


its based in my sailing experience out in the gulf of hauraki in nz, just the sea and sky and the clouds..............




                vast rolling sea.

                beyond the clouds, blue empty sky.

                clouds like ropes

                coiling and winding

                uncoiling unwinding

                along and beyond

                the blue empty sky




      from




that is from ealier days when i was more autistic and is easily my best stuff and just makes me weep with what i have lost with the success of the compendium and the BCD making me more neurotypical introducing the complexities of love and all the other issues


on the other hand if not for them i would be dead



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if you write a poem, you just have to trust the poem for what it is


it really pays to read the great poets like emily dickenson, wang wei, philip larkin


on you tube you can listen to w. h. auden and sylivia plath actually reading thier stuff (avoid other people reading thier poems)


osip mandelstham's "the sea shell" is proably the best poem ever written along with shelly's "ode to the west wind"


keats's "ode on a grecian urn" too, it helps to understand there was no single grecian urn as per the poem, in fact he was looking at the elgin marbles


the urn as described could never exist in reality, it is of infinity


"to the light house" by virginia woolf is another really great book


if you read this sort of quality the poems you write will upgrade


this is the work of a lifetime



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the only point to writing a poem is your own joy in the words and insights, the general public attitidue is very pissy to poetry, they don't like the brain stress poetry induces



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poems come from loss


the writing is really secondary to making observations over a while


they come together in a poem


this poem writing at its best, fun and spontaneous



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bascially its just putting a jigsaw together



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its very hard to tell the worth of some poems until a bit of time has gone by, its important to hang onto them and look back at them later



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meaning itself evaporates, that is what poetry is about