The favourite poem of my late teens was The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot. It spoke to the self-conscious mix of desires I was feeling at the time with Eliot’s somewhat sentimental take on aging. It chimed with my own naivety and early fatalistic tendencies:
In my mid to late 20s, The House of Belonging by David Whyte moved me significantly, pulling me into an elliptical orbit of irregular visitation. The idea of finding oneself in a house in which one truly belonged was aspirational, having left home and spent 11 years in almost as many residences:
There are some wonderful poems in his collection of the same name and some terrible ones, like the poem dedicated to The Boeing Company’s new 777 passenger jet entitled Working Together (no really). From the lazy and reflective habitation among the bees “going from door to door in the tall forest of the daisies” to the rapid combustion of hydrocarbons that propels humans as fast as they’re ever likely to travel.
Approaching 40, I’m looking for a new poem to build the next 7 or 10 years around. What will be its theme? I’m drawn to passages of the Tao Te Ching, particularly in the capable (though, she admits, interloping) hands of Ursula Le Guin. Her stories have been mind-expanders for me, particularly A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness.
Chapter 19, Raw Silk and Uncut Wood, ends with a fragment that I might well get tattooed on the back of my hand:
Perhaps over-preening and over-styled, but another aspiration that may be worthy.
I’ve recently started writing poems after reading Dante’s Inferno, The Epic of Gilgamesh and the textbook Reading Poetry: An Introduction by Tom Furniss and Michael Bath. I wrote some poor juvenile stuff in my teens, mostly about my heartbreaks and confusions. In this new phase of writing I have tried to study the form and craft, aiming for an improvement.
Here I will share a selection of poems from this period of study, updated and added to occasionally: