2 February 2004. Spurred by Geof Huth's example, I have decided to start this, mine 64th year, with the creation of a blog. My intention is each day to write a few new words each day about me and poetry--for this site only.

At some point, I may get ambitious and pep up the looks of my blog, but for now all I care about is legibility.

This entry is about a poem I thought up this morning while riding my bike to the high school I substitute teach at. It's a six-and-a-half mile trip, so I often let my mind wander. If I've been having trouble with a poem or other piece of writing, I might mull it over. I rarely think of a new poem, but this time I did. It happened as I came to and passed the street my friend Kevin Kelly AKA Surllama lived on for a few years until quite recently. The poem came to me quickly:

Okay, I should let those of you who don't know me that I meant the poem to be horrideously bad. All rhyme and cliche of both language and sentiment. Even though it was true, every bit of it: Kevin's girlfriend from California had enticed him to moved in with her. And I did miss him. I composed the poem, though, because I thought he'd get a laugh out of it.

A minor joke . . . until--and this is why I'm bothering to discuss it here--it gave me an idea I may well follow up on. The idea was to compose variations on it, seriously intended variations. Is it possible that I could make it retroactively aesthetically formidable?

Well, I haven't had time to do much with it. One idea immediately struck me, which was to use the final word of each original line as the first word of the line based on it in the variation. I thought that would make it a little less predictable than having the variation's end-rhymes the same as the original's. A few lines and phrases occurred to me before I got to my school (Charlotte High School in Punta Gorda, Florida). The ones I remembered, I jotted down later, with a few additions that struck me as I wrote. The result was just a start: "Street chunked through canopy-shadows toward the harbor/ Palominoed possibilities of the oncoming afternoon,/Feteless but/Gala nonetheless . . ." Hopeless? Who knows? But I like "Palominoed possibilities," which "pal" led to. The idea of a slang term badly used transformed to Grand Diction appeals to me.

More on this poem, I hope, in later entries.