An Open Book

This is an open book in two senses of the term.It is open because it is a work in progress. Over the years I have tinkered with most of these poems many times and have revised some of them quite thoroughly. Their publication here does not mean I am done with them.Yet there are some poems which I have not altered in years, not because they are perfect, but because they reflect my intention at the time I wrote them. Just because I have changed into a different man with the passage of years does not mean I should expunge the traces of my earlier self that these poems represent.So this open book is a collection of the poems I happened to choose for publication at this time, in the form I happen to prefer at the moment.This book is open in another sense, however. Since the days of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, poetry has been steadily dying as a public art form, because poets, taught to value obscurity and difficulty, have labored to make their verse less and less accessible to untrained readers.I see little point in creating verse that has no readers except a tiny club who have learned a private code.Anyone can be obscure -- all you have to do to achieve obscurity is to write incompetently.To be clear and yet also say something worth saying is what I believe poets should strive for. The first reading should reward the reader. If later readings reveal new insights, so much the better; but if the first reading did not achieve Dryden's recipe of sweetness and light, why should a reader return for a second pass?