Rushing In

Maybe I'm too late, but I hope not. For most of my life, poetry has been something that other people wrote. Reading it lost some of its appeal as leisure became more scarce. To read poetry fairly takes so much more time than to read prose. There was a time in middle age when I took to writing it--without much faith. Now, with no one I know interested in such things, this seems like the place to let it out for air. Well, maybe not.

When tossing words out into the ether this way, I'm surprised when I get any response at all, but even more surprised at what elicits one. Comments show up on material that strikes me as too personal to be of interest to others, though its revelation provides some kind of catharsis for me.

After meeting three poets online who saw fit to send me kind and encouraging replies to some Hilltop Notes posts, I can hardly believe that the poems I've had the temerity to show have drawn neither comment nor disdain.

Cool Plums Weblog has been posting wonderful lectures on Robert Frost, who must be one of the most widely loved and respected writers of the twentieth or any century. I blame this whiny post in part on the inspiring reading of what shows up there. It has to be one of the most wonderful places to go back to school that one could find anywhere. And if there's a scintilla of verse in your bloodstream, Frost must make you write -- and hope.