Charming, Modest and I have a bi....

I've laid a lot of bricks.

The above sentence probably best represents who I am. It is honest and a little tongue and cheek. I grew up in Spokane Washington, my parents were better than the "Beavers" and I have no personal trauma's by which I define myself. I am 100% guy. I like sports, Bar-B-Que, action flicks, and sparcely clad women.

Politically I am presently more Republican than Democrat. I call myself a Libertarian Imperialist which is both accurate and impossible.

For the record I am married and I have a couple of daughters. This is some kind of kharmic retribution. It is a terrible burden that I smile through because if I don't I'll get yelled at.

On Writing Poetry

So you come to my website and you see that I've called it a Poet's Page and you must figure that I think I'm a good writer. Well, actually that's not true. I really don't know what "good writing" is. I know bad writing when I read it but then others may find it not so bad. That's the point really, to explain I'll combine two well known phases "You can't please all the people all the time, so you've got to please yourself." In my opinion that has got to be your mantra if you wish to write.

The experts all say that if you want to work or get paid as a writer, you have to study the magazine or publisher that you are trying to sell to, and write to the style that they seem to like. That sounds a lot like work to me. I refuse to do it. Writing for me is a joy and I'll be damned if I'm going to write in a way that I hope somebody else likes. The only way to do it is to write to please yourself and then find someone who likes you for what you write, period. It's a lot like finding a girlfriend.

Writing poetry is especially dangerous. People have come to expect poetry to be bad. Read the works of some famous or award winning poets and see if you don't start reaching for the bottle of Tylenol. Free Verse is not free; the cost in headache medicine alone is frightening.

Modern poets seem to treat rhyme as if it were in some way beneath them. My poems are likely to rhyme. I guess I'll not be a celebrated modern poet but then I don't see those guys getting much play.

Poetry is about having fun with words and writing is about telling a story or eliciting a mood. I figure that anyway you do that is fine.