A Few Personal Thoughts
by R.E. Slater
April 22, 2009
This page was entered to help facilitate a Google or Blogger Internet search for any published writings I might submit at some future date when I decide to produce them to the public. Before I do I must consult with a publisher to determine the best course of action for my hard-earned efforts. At present I am focused on writing new pieces, re-editing some I've completed, working through rough outlines and jotting down odd bits of stray thoughts.
In lieu of mine own handiwork I will place other poems or articles on this blog site that may mark my progress or my poetic burdens in one fashion or another. For instance, some of my poems deal with the concept of "time" and when discovering that TS Eliot had worked on this in similar fashion I listed a couple of his poems that felt similar to my own thoughts. And like some of mine own, Daisy Turner's poem had a touch of sadness and truth in it, and so, I thought to put that up on my blog as well.
Some poems I just like and have no correlation whatsoever to my own writings other than as bright goals reminding me just how good a poet can be with his or her words, phrases, concise thoughts, insights, and such like. Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath and Wilfred Owen can fall into these camps as forgotten poets of old that need remembering, in my estimation, by us, their poetic readers.
Initially I wanted to mark my writing progress and tell of the background and development of select pieces I am producing - to give them a kind of "literary history" that would make them more personal when later discovered and read. And so, from time-to-time, I will do this but without the poem itself these will only be incomplete histories and I apologize beforehand that I can do no better.
Summer now approaches and I find myself worn down a bit or too easily distracted from my daily routine of poem development; causing me to slow down or quit altogether these past several months. It seems that my little writer's room has closed in on me and I've lost the inspiration - or the motivation - that has driven me to produce so many thoughts and words these past several years. There seems to be the never-ending minutia of personal responsibilities requiring my attention so that I must simply stop awhile and address them.
As such, these sallow, callous demands placed on my creative time and thinking have caused my soul to feel "stretched and thinned," to wander, having stayed my hand too long from its pen making me wish for a writer's retreat. A place where I might systematically re-dedicate myself to my hopes and ambitions, to the written word and page, to the inter-weaving of thoughts and expressions. And yet, however I might wish it, I question whether it were so easy to leave one's now tangled life for a simpler one and for so selfish a purpose. Thus I suspect that I must attain this re-invention in a steadier, more purposeful evacuation of the old life to a one requiring an enforced bohemian existence of writing and "seeming" personal irresponsibility. For however hastily I may wish it, while continuing to question whether it is the most proper, the most wise course of action, it is perhaps my only course of action, and the one that tirelessly fights against my personal dreads and reluctance to publish.
For neither time nor opportunity are endless, each must be used efficiently to accomplish, to read and understand, to express and enjoin, all that I would. Nor can there be found the natural literary outlets or social bonds that my new interests now demand as I suffer alone in my private world to create story lines in an other-worldly existence foreign to those friendships around me. And yet the goal is to finish what I have started in the short years ahead and someday share with you my poems and stories, delights and wonders, wanderings and journeys in that strange and marvelous land of words and ideas.
RE Slater
April 22, 2009
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