One of my poems I wrote in 1995, a ballad entitled Inspiration X was accepted by the e-zine Intermix, but shortly afterward the magazine folded. Most of my poems are at my website, which seems to accept all of my submissions. I have many friends and relatives who read and critique my poems. 

I am still experimenting, still trying to find a comfortable niche of obsession in the word world. Besides using certain indispensable writing reference tools (dictionary, thesaurus, rhyming dictionary), I have references of forms and style -- my favorite being The New Book of Forms by Lewis Turco which I acquired in 1994 -- and numerous books of poetry by various authors. Some of my most inspiring poets are Shakespeare, John Donne, Charles Swineburne, E. E. Cummings, Langston Hughes, Margaret Atwood, and Leonard Cohen. 

It is very easy to write for yourself and exactly difficult to write for others. In writing and showing my poetry I have learned a lot about catering to the audience, and revising pieces in response to what I learn works (or doesn't work) for the reader. Wherever I show my work, I try to pull out criticism. My favorite readers are those who ask questions and tell me where they stumbled, or tell me which part of the poem didn't sit quite right and why, or why this poem stunk, while this one was good. I show my works to as many people as possible, and gauging their responses, rewrite as necessary until I consider it more or less complete. I say "more or less" because I rarely count a poem as finished. In a painting class I once took, my teacher said he should keep someone behind me, perhaps holding a brick, to remind me when I was done. My poetry is similar; I am always ready to experiment with a word or stanza.

Most of my poetry is highly structured, often containing internal rhyme, alliteration, consonance, and heavy meter. My favorite poems are those that are rich in vocabulary, double meanings, and puns. Because I am fascinated with the sounds and rhythms of phrases (sometimes even more than the imagery or theme), I often write in classic forms. I like to write sonnets (an example is The Violation), and I can get caught up in villanelles, sestinas, and other forms. I often analyze famous poems and practice by pushing words into their structures. A good example of this is Villanelle o' the Poet Rogue, where I jammed Scottish vocabulary into a French form.

The more challenging the form, the more obsessed I become with accomplishing it; Laminar Animal, a poem personifying (animalfying?) my lust for various friends, is written entirely in palindromes (each line reads forward and backward). I like to hide a poem's form-this is sometimes difficult to do. Most people who read Tarzan Trips Forever don't get caught up in the fact that it is a sestina, and that, I think, is the first sign of a good sestina.

I also invent my own strict forms, most often by finding structure in something I've started, and sticking with the framework the rest of the way through the poem. Such a poem is Inspiration X. Some of these forms are really just mutants of classical forms -- Broken Sonnet of Five Homeless is an example. I try to make the feeling or the theme of each poem work well with the structure. In Enkidu Awakes: the Sixth Day, a poem that alludes to a Sanskrit story that is thousands of years old, I use an equally old style of writing, grammatic parallelism (repeating the beginnings of lines), to help sink the poem farther back in time: 
 

The Ring follows groups of long lines with short lines to slow down the action and to zoom into images: 
 

The most difficult type of poetry for me to write is prose-poetry (also called "free verse"), but I think it is a highly viable, strong genre. Where the classical poetic forms are like stages and sets to aid you in putting on your plays, prose poetry abandons the stage, making the poem depend more upon the phrasing, subject, and presentation. The actors are ranging through the audience, or building the stage as they go along. Enkidu Awakes is bordering on this style, and some, like Chapter one- In a small shaded house, almost become prose. Some of my poems start out as prose-verse and fall into a tighter form; song of a man whose friend is such a poem. 

I have a problem with what I see in a lot of what some people might call "poetry" lately. Prose, written in such a way that it looks good on paper, is not necessarily prose-poetry. It may be a valid art form, but unless it has a pattern to find (and usually in English poetry this means a metrical, syllabic, or at least a phrasing pattern), it is beyond the edge of poetry, and not what I am looking for while writing. (For instance, though "spoken word" is great to listen to, a lot of spoken word isn't poetry either; I'll listen, I'll enjoy but I won't call it poetry.) -- Maybe I'm being a little snooty, but for some reason I am compelled to draw a line in that no-man's land of prosetry (for lack of a better portmanteau). 

The trick when writing prose-poetry is to swim in that rip-tide between lyrics and prose without being pulled into either area. This balance of prose in poetry has its merits, just as too much verse can sometimes have detriment. I sometimes find that I've written a poem that is so heavily and regularly drumming, its meter is so unvarying and the rhyme so trite, that it may turn out to be more unnerving to a reader than prose thrown attractively onto the page. 

As for theme, most of my poetry is about my own life experiences and observations. I often take events in my life and infuse them with mythic or metaphysical symbols. For example, Chapter one is about one particularly disturbing year of my life, and because the year ended with so many unresolved issues, the poem also doesn't quite resolve itself. Even in a poem about something as trivial as getting a parking ticket (The Violation), some lines have double meanings that allude to ancient times:
 

As I occasionally like to conceal my forms, so I like to conceal my personal life in scenes and plots of poems. Writing is often an outlet for me, a way to vent my feelings. Contrary to other authors, however, I cannot usually write morbid or sad thoughts when I am feeling morbid or sad. I have to be in a good mood to write, but I can easily write about a bad mood I was in a week ago.