Page 8 - flying stones

Suggested Opening Remarks at Your First Public Reading

I will begin my reading with an introductory poem I have titled:
Advice to a New Poet from an Old One in the hope that there is

still a new poet among us willing to listen to an old poet - and an

old poet who isn’t deaf, or has decent batteries recently replaced.

And I will follow with reading from a group of poems I refer to
as Poems that I have Written that are Great, subtitled A Modest

Collection, further subtitled If I Can Find Any. This reading will,

in turn, be followed by a reading of poems from my copious
anthology titled Poems I have Written - that I thought Were Great

when I Wrote them – and Now Wish I had Lost under Romantic or

Otherwise Notable Circumstances.

Before I start, I see that that there are no new poets here. Each

of you should be standing where I am, reading to me. You have
undoubtedly suffered deep lesions bestowed on those of us who

have not had the common sense or heroic fortune to die young.

You have written memorable lines; inspired and worthy words,
rich with tradition or spontaneously novel, free from the clash of

competitive speech, easy clichés, rancid rhetoric or trilobites of

what’s in fashion.

Because you are willing to listen to poems of lesser merit than
your own, you must be driven by the poet’s demon, unleashed

from a sudden awareness of one casual shard of truth finding its

mark amidst a wasteland of dead phrases – arising from the
subconscious – followed by one subtle, unexpected epiphany –

immediately overwhelmed by a haunting, unrelenting

obsession to recover the moment, free of self-awareness.