The Fool Who Discovered Poetry

Sometime, a long time ago, as a young man I came across 'Do not go gentle into that good night', by Dylan Thomas and my whole perspective of poetry was changed. Previously, poems had seemed like baggage suffered by students who used them as tools of influence during English Lit, exams. For me personally, they belonged to another epoch, an age of romantics, an age of sophistication, way beyond the bump and grind of modern day art and its notoriety. Poetry was feeble, or else boring, a Ted Hughes quatrain, signifying very little; verse by numbers, pseudos flexing their polysyllabic muscle for the joy of university elitists. Then, as I say, there was Thomas. A man born to poetry, a man cutting through pretence, discarding artifice and living through the spirit of soul expression. I followed where he led and discovered the poetic art of a multitude of creators. As well as the British scene, I was drawn to American poets like Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sylvia Plath, James Baldwin and Elizabeth Sargent. I was on a journey and what's more - I found that I too could express myself through this strange method of word dancing, this strange method of delving beneath surface values so as to meet my God, or even my Satan. Although I've appeared on local radio stations and in small independent poetry magazines, I've never managed to put a group of my poems under the one roof of a book, until now. Times have changed. The internet gives a far greater range to those who can aspire to authorship. This is my first forage into that realm. May there be many more.