Don Williams’ Blog

Don January 3rd, 2008

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Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in interminable blank verse on “the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I am told that there are still people who read it of their own free will.  Lacking the skill and the endurance to sustain such an ambitious project, I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, combining short bursts of prose with verse of various kinds.  Lacking also both the arrogance and the faith in subjectivity for its own sake which would be necessary to think that the growth of this poetic mind should be of even the passing interest which a blog can generate, I shall also attempt a more modest topic:  ”Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”  I shall illustrate those lessons with some of the poems I wrote in the process of learning them.  I hope my readers will be charitable enough to think that sometimes the lessons are shown by my successes.  I know that one can often learn even more from one’s failures.  No doubt the reader will have plenty of chances to observe that truth in action.  The most egregious examples of it will be passed over in silence, in courteous consideration for the reader’s patience and the author’s ego.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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