I was digging around the archives of my computer and came across a bunch of poetry I wrote in the 1990s. Some of it is cringe-inducingly bad. Several have not aged well, particularly my "cyber" series. But a few stand out as interesting at least to me for various reasons.
They all remind me of a long period of my life when I saw myself primarily as a poet. Someday I would like to do more creative writing, but that irrepressible spark of invention that used to seize me back in the day has long left me. Which makes me a little sad.
I decided to put a small selection of my poems online on the older version of this site. Some of them are funny, or at least attempting to be. Some are more explicitly political or spiritual in nature. Others are just downright strange.
A couple of comments on some of them:
My personal favorite for a long time, which I read typically at the beginning or end of my readings was "Santos Panganiban." This is my most autobiographical work, although there are parts of it that still puzzle me.
One of my most formalist poems is "Roosevelt Island" which tries to mimick the tone and pacing of Matthew Arnold’s "Dover Beach." I find it still relevant and poignant.
"White Pages" is my favorite New York poem, which came to me when I got the first edition of the NYNEX phone book that included my name and number in it.
"My Favorite Camper" still kind of creeps my out. It was an experiment in writing from the voice of an unreliable narrator, in the vein of Robert Browning’s "My Last Duchess," which I think came off quite well.