Thanks a lot!  I started reading your book
On Poetry – Oh, what I’ve been missing!
But I knew I should take a second look
after many years I had been dissing
the need to take my work more seriously –
you have many excellent things to say
and in a way not imperiously.

I must begin to look without delay,
following on my many disasters,
at forms employed by the artful masters
who knew what they were doing when they wrote.

Of Maxwell’s many lines in brief I’ll quote:
“Line break is all you’ve got” on the white page
to separate your poem from your prose –
the time, the beat, the rhythm of the stage.

A poet yet in time I’ll be, who knows?

Portland, Oregon – April 22, 2016

This wreck of a rhyming pentameter poem is “inspired” by beginning to read Glyn Maxwell’s book On Poetry published in 2012, Oberon Books. It’s a good choice to begin my more careful look at the meaning of poetry, how to read and write it.  I recommend it.  One problem is that, as I look at poetic forms and how poetry works, I’m more challenged in actually writing, worried that I’m not “getting the form” correct.  Well, there’s a balance thing I need to live with as I try to learn some things.