Time Line

YOUTH: All I remember writing is parody lyrics for Boy Scout meeting songs. In high school, some popular romantic songs appear on “Your Hit Parade,” and I become aware of Broadway.

COLLEGE: I attempt writing a musical script, Sunspots on the Moon. I don’t turn it into Creative Writing professor, because he requires short stories. I have begun to versify.

1967-2004: Joys and tribulations of work life, family life, and spaces between have the pen in high gear, especially in moments of euphoria or distress. Notebooks of verse ideas appear, mostly in rhythmic patterns, and many become verses adding to a growing binder.

2007! I have “retired,” and I discover poetry venues and chapbooks. One of my mentors helps novice poets create chapbooks — forty-four pages max, so that trimming doesn’t over-bulk the resulting book — I cull the notebooks — and I am off and running with my first publication, introverses.

introverses are  life experience poems in six chapters: loverses, leaverses, grieverses, recoverses, relativerses, and believerses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2011: extraverses follows a few years later, with the Animal Friends series and the Mary Bodio watercolored A Rainbow Journey and You Can Be Santa’s Helper in between.

extraverses presents more life experience poems, plus a few sections of narrative poems: narrativerses, commemorativerses, festiverses, appreciativerses,       sensitiverses, and reviverses.

Cover art for both introverses and extraverses was provided by my nephew, Graphic Artist Christopher Meeks.

These d.i.y. volumes are available by emailing sunsetc9@gmail.com. Each book is $8.00, plus $1 each for shipping.