My blogs

Blogs I follow

Gender	Male
Occupation	retired, international development
Location	Northampton, Mass.
Introduction	I began writing poetry in 8th grade, wrote little after college, but began writing again after retiring 15 years ago from a 38-year career in international development. I like and try to write poetry that’s clear and accessible and evokes for the reader the feelings that inspired the poem. I don't care for cryptic, obscure or highly ambiguous poems or poems in which the feeling is buried under layers of intellectualization. I subscribe to Wordsworth’s dictum “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” As most aphorisms, this exaggerates, but the core connection of poetry with feelings is true for me. For my taste too much contemporary poetry subordinates feeling to intellectual display.
Interests	poetry, accessible poetry, poetry you can understand, clear poetry, Antonio Machado, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Garcia Lorca, Hart Crane, May Swenson, Tony Hoagland, Bertolt Brecht, Dermot Bolger, Elizabeth Bishop, Rilke, Eliot, Pound, Billie Collins, Mary Oliver, Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin, Louise Labe, Howard Nemerov, Francois Villon