Poetry

A long time ago, I published a collection of poems for an exhibition of works by the artist Gabrielle Quinn. The main long poem accompanying Quinn’s artwork—written at the height of youth, inexperience, and blissful naivety—can be found here. Over the years, I have written a number of other poems, which have always remained, for good or bad, in that ubiquitous drawer. In past versions of this website, I simply presented them below in order to give them some fresh air. But a number of commentators pointed out that they might be worth publishing. Having now sought the advice of a couple of professional award-winning poets, I concluded that they should indeed stay, not in the drawer because that still implies hope, but most simply, once again, on this website in PDF format. The rationale for such a decision was a simple one: to master the craft of poetry takes time and having dedicated my life to writing philosophy, the time dedicated to poetry is simply too slim to do it justice. It is thus without regret and a renewed sense of freedom that I upload them below. They are what they are and I’m happy with that. Any previous versions found online should simply be discarded without hesitation and with my wholehearted thanks.

Overall, when I write a poem, I never conceive it as “high poetry,” merely as an antidote to the scientific nature of philosophy. I write poems entirely intuitively with only a secondary attention to stresses, meters, rhymes, rhythm, or form (I would fare pretty badly if I entered competitions for sestinas, villanelles, or sonnets). I don’t write to capture the veracity of an emotion, the truthfulness of an opinion, or the universality of an experience. I also don’t write to create a bon mot or a deliberate equivoque in the hope that the reader goes “aww.” For me, poetry needs to convey an unquestionable sense (expression, feeling, or faculty) and be on the verge of chattiness, even if, on first impressions, it all looks, of course, cryptic and deliberately confusing.