by Ken O'Steen
From a land far, far way perhaps; but still kind of nice I thought. The subject matter couldn’t be called a drastic departure from more contemporary preoccupations even if the light sheen of romanticism did distinguish it.
I’d glanced at enough high quality poetry reviews to know that absence of technical razzle-dazzle, and metaphysical ballast in my little poems relegated them to a ghetto of proletarian poetry. It was for the best, since I wouldn’t enjoy myself in the better environment anyhow. If Elizabethan sonnets had started dropping out of me I probably would have run away in fright. It was not lost on me that if one was unlikely to understand the exegesis by others of a poem one had written, one had little business writing poems at all. To do so would only make one something of a bad poetry citizen, would it not?