My main blog is Earth Whispering, in which I practice the discipline of writing a poem a day. You can reach it with the tab Earth Whispering Poems, above. This blog, the one you’re reading now, I don’t expect to be as prolific, but I want a place to post my thoughts about the process — writing, publishing, illustrating, presenting my work to the world. I hope it will encourage others who yearn to bring forth their unique gifts.

Before I started writing and publishing a poem a day, the poems that I did write would pace about my head from time to time. Some of them had tunes, and I would sing them. Others just had rhythms that would lend themselves well to the steady pedaling of my bicycle, and they would play themselves as I rode along. Behind each one of them would surface the plea, “let me out.” They would say, “listen to me, I’m good, am I not? Isn’t that image great, isn’t the juxtaposition of my words inspired?”

“I don’t know,” I’d tell them. “I like you, but who am I? I don’t know anything about poetry and how it is judged.”

So the poems would play themselves and go away, and come back again with a certain wistfulness. They gave me both joy and sadness, in the cloister of my mind.

Now that I write and publish a poem a day, they no longer haunt me. I haunt them sometimes, looking at the stats from my blog to see if anyone has looked, hoping for comments. But I don’t memorize them – there are too many of them for that, and each day demands its insights to be chronicled. They now bring me joy, with no sadness.

So if you are a closet poet — if you, also, have poems and songs that pace in your head and plead for you to release them, I deeply encourage you to let them go!

2012 marked, in addition to my blog, the print publication of two collections of poetry. This has been a remarkable experience, with much to share. I’ll talk about that in my next post.