I'm not sure if I write poems for myself or for other people. It started with me writing poems for women who inflamed me; I wrote for other people. Then again, I also got a huge satisfaction from the words, rhythms, rhymes, metres and constructions of the poems; I wrote for myself.
I began to understand that those elements and their arrangement contributed to the meaning and power of the poem. I began to understand how poems could convey and simplify the truths of sensations, feelings and emotions; they could be distillations of those truths, enormously powerful.
So I tried to hone my skills at creating those distillations. That was for my own satisfaction; but I am a weak and foolish man and I thirst for the appreciation, approbation and admiration of others.
My pleasure and satisfaction, derived from writing poems, are not enough; I need other people to be pleased and satisfied with them as well. I want people to laugh at the funny ones, weep at the poignant or sad ones. I want people to recognise the sensations, feelings and emotions which gave rise to the poems and to empathise with them, to savour or rejoice in them.
I want people to know the places I write about, the people I write about. I want my poems to move people as they move me. I cannot read my serious poems aloud without emotional upheaval.
Some of them are intensely personal, some are impenetrable and some are imprudent. Some are impudent. Flatulence seems to be a recurring theme in many.
