Worlds Away From Home

The poems in this thesis deal primarily with finding a safe and perhaps even joyful place in this precarious and saddening world. If they have a theoretical foundation, it is in my fervent and idealistic desire that they be read aloud by ordinary people with the recognition that poetry can be entertainment; ordinary people and the details of our lives are my subjects, and my language is rarely other than formalized ordinary language. In these aspects, then, my work seems to lean toward both realism and romanticism. The art which most. profoundly affected my literary development, however, is that of William Shakespeare, John Donne, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost and Joyce Carol Dates--their poetry and prose, and especially the rhythms and images they created, recur consistently, often wordlessly, in my mind at unanticipated and involuntary intervals. In the same way, the rhythms and images of my own poems arrive in my mind of their own volition. The craft which has gone into this collection--focusing, sharpening the images, and working the sounds and rhythms so that the poems move--has been in the hope that the poems will delight and perhaps even enlighten others as they have me.