Abandoned verse

I was once a poet. Some days I still try to be.

But overall, the muse has been revoked. Inspiration is a whore who's run off to whoever's pandering the most.

I could blame writing all the time in other mediums; between the column, the blog, the random prose and spotty fiction, there's not a lot of room left for verse.

Good verse, that is. For all the poetry I churned out daily in college, I sputtered through a lot of bad lines. But now the good is much harder to find; just crafting more than a half-dozen lines proves Herculean. Also scary is amount of repeated lines from other poems I've written than snake their way into the stanzas.


When visiting a professor at Mercyhurst, he reminded me that Rimbaud quit poetry at 19 - an uncomfortable thought for someone who still wants to put the words on the page -- Not mention Keats, who coughed out his last breaths next to Rome's Spanish Steps at age 26 (and mine at the time- way to show compassion, Doc Schiff).

I'm not giving up, though. I still see some of them making it into a journal before I die. The biggest problem is the way I write; it doesn't match up with modern poetry too well and the language grows too dense too quickly. Maybe I just need an editor with a machete

Poetry groups have proven too limiting- people tend to take a greater interest in my last name than what I read.

The hills are steeper, the verse more elusive, but there's always a muse. She's just choosing to travel well-veiled these days.