The Books

Notes on the books:

Skin By Skin’s Own Prisms Burnt:  The Compleat Werks

This is a compilation of my early poems and jottings, beginning from about the age of 15, into my mid-30’s.  So that would be from the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s.  As I have written, this volume could more correctly be called The Compleat Early Werks.

I can know the cutoff point precisely because we moved in 1984, shortly before Reagan’s re-election.  My writings were packed into a box for the move and in the next house the box was stuck in a closet where it remained for the entire time we lived there.  By the start of the 1980’s I had been writing almost nothing and then the election result and the entire period was so discouraging that I stopped thinking about writing altogether.  And life was then full with family, home and work.

We made another brief move in 2000, and in 2001 settled into the home we have now.  Each time the box ended up in another closet.

In late 2012 I found myself recuperating at home following a surgery.  I was physically incapacitated for several weeks (the first time ever) and looking for a way to fill my time.  I slid the box with my papers out of the closet and started to sort through them.  I began to key and transpose those early writings into pages on my computer, editing, arranging, and also shredding a lot.  Working on that project into early 2013 left me with the basic document that I, then in retirement, turned into the book in 2022.

The earliest pieces, mostly what makes up “The Moment Musicale” and some of the “Dispatches” sections, find their first inspiration in John Lennon’s, In His Own Write, and also in my becoming aware of Stephen Crane’s, The Black Riders and Other Lines.  As a teenager these seemingly disparate sources struck a particular chord with me.  On one hand a wry, winking, and ironic humor and then also a darker, cynical, but resolutely empathetic heart for the situation of human creature.

Some of the poems in this book were originally pieces composed for various writing classes, sometimes intended to be in one poetic form or another.  It may be hard to find many of those.  While I may have begun with a form the poem almost invariably broke out of bounds.  I ended up chasing after.  Also, a number of the “songs” were written during this period.  Many of them I had recorded but over the years the tapes were lost.

I will admit and acknowledge that in the earlier period there are a few twinges of what might generously be classified as “youthful angst.”  I think however that they come tempered with a certain dark humor and an underlying sardonic self-deprecation.  I think that anyway.

After completing my degree, and married, I found myself needing income and health insurance.  I went to work in a machine shop, “For a year or two, until something better comes along.”  As I like to tell people, after forty-three years in manufacturing something better did come along: Retirement.  It was in the mid-to-late ‘70’s that the few of what I call the “labor songs” were written, generally in my head as I fed the machines on the long night shifts, singing to myself.

“The Dispatches of Curmudgeonous Erectus ExPoetus” is a catch-all of assorted random observations, life thoughts and conclusions from throughout the entire span of this collection.  That is, from the teenage years up to of those of a younger man in his mid-30’s.  Some were ideas that had been intended to be worked into poems but never got there.  A sampling of realizations and perspectives of one conscious life form looking at existence and what it seems to be from here.  Sending out little messages in bottles.

This book, Skin By Skin’s Own Prisms Burnt: The Compleat Werks, was included in the Poets House 29th Showcase, December 2024 to March 2025, for books of poetry published in 2022 and 2023.

Questions I have been asked:

Q.    “Why did you choose to print [the book] in that font like that?”

W.D.     In the early days I hand-wrote all of my poetry.   As I started to accumulate some poems, I would occasionally put together small hand-bound booklets of my poems for friends, teachers, sometimes for class projects.  This was just about the time that copying machines were coming into use.  So for me then, photocopying my poems, the handwritten appearance became part of the look and impact I liked for the pieces.  For me it came to seem a part of the poem, integral.

  Now, however, at this point in life my handwriting is no longer too good, not consistently.  Additionally, I probably would   have been forced to produce the book pages by way of scanning.

  I chose to use the font jenkins2.0  because it presents similar enough to my former handwriting. 

Q.    “Why are the pages not numbered?  And there is no table of contents.  I didn’t notice at

        first, but it is so annoying trying to find something again.”

W.D.    The simple answer is that I was not able to figure out how to make the page numbers work in the document.

             I did try several times but I could not get it to work, and in the end, I just gave up.  That is it.  No “artistic” motive. 

             I would have used them.

Living Mortal:  Later Poems, 2019-2022

A few years into retirement I was thinking about my degree in English nearly 50 years previous, and wondering what had been going on in contemporary poetry all those years while I had been otherwise occupied.  I began doing some reading and wondering if I might try my hand at writing again.  I was looking at my earlier writings and thinking about taking some of the prose pieces in the “Dispatches” section and seeing if I could now work those into poem form.  I even had come up with the title, Living Mortal, as a general theme for where I wanted go.  I was just a couple of months into this, with only a handful of potential poems coming into shape, when my father passed away.  That then changed the direction of the work.  It ended up as something else.

Living Mortal: Later Poems was published in February of 2022, a month earlier than the older works comprising  Skin By Skin’s Own Prisms Burnt.

Both of the questions and answers above, concerning the font chosen and the lack of page numbers, will also apply to this book.

This book was also included in the Poets House 29th Showcase, December 2024 to March 2025, for books of poetry published in 2022 and 2023.

Too Late (for) Poems:  Late Later Poems, 2022-2024

This book was actually begun when I found a poem which I had intended to include in Living Mortal, but had been overlooked.  Hence the “Late Later Poems.”

Just as I had released Living Mortal, I found online the poetry site and forum, AllPoetry.  I signed up and began to post both new and older poems on my page there for comment from others on the site.  The comments were supportive, inciteful, sometimes funny, and the critical points were useful too.  Many – most – of the poems in Too Late (for) Poems were first posted on AllPoetry, or at least some version of them.  This collection also contains a number of previously unpublished poems.

Too Late (for) Poems was first published at the end of September of 2024.  Here again I had picked up the idea of incorporating ideas from the “Dispatches,” you may see that in several of these pieces.

Again, the questions and answers above concerning the font chosen and the lack of page numbers will still apply to this volume.

This book is slated to be included in the Poets House 30th Showcase, beginning December 2025 through March 2026, for books of poetry published in 2024.