Why I wrote my poetry collection: year of the Dog
My love for stories arrived fast with morning cartoons and nighttime bedtime tales. I was the child who went looking for adventures in a bookshop, someone who looked for himself in heroes who stood for the right thing. All the time I was savouring the words, I was developing a love for beautiful sentences that held meaning. My love for poetry arrived much later.
Why I started writing poetry
I came to poetry with a need to improve my prose; I stayed because I found a new home.
We have all dredged through the archaic English works of Shakespeare at school, looked at the ‘thee’ and ‘thou’, and wondered how people used to talk. All the stanzas seemed to belong to some other time, with some other people: the wise thoughts and deep emotions buried under a ruble of impenetrable language. All the beauty was lost on us. Perhaps we were too young.
Then Pablo Neruda arrived with his sad and beautiful lines, writing, for example, “The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’ The night wind revolves in the sky and sings. Tonight, I can write the saddest lines. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.” And Bukowski, with his philosophy of “Do not try,” declared, “If you have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen or hunched over your typewriter searching for words, don’t do it.”
And a love for words sneaked up on me.
What poetry allows me to say
I have always been a man of few words: someone who talks briefly, with sincerity, and often holds things in. The art of a poem exists in a moment of precision, beauty and shortness, and the form let me say the words that needed to be said. And I like saying the words when someone makes me think about days of kindness.
What brought Year of the Dog together?
When I look at my early work, I wonder why I dressed the words in rags when the muses knew I wasn’t poor. Then there were the years where I asked the gods if all of this wasn’t too much. On a January night last year, the lonely one came knocking. All I remember is feeling cold and numb, like something had grabbed my heart and was dialling down the life force. The next day felt like a lease on a new life, and I wondered at the bird singing in the tree outside my windowsill, even when winter had stilled the sky. I started building snowmen out of the falling cold and looking for songs on the noisy street.
Why I decide they belonged in a book
As the year went on, my small musings picked a rhythm of its own and assumed a sequence. They wondered at seasons, time, and love in my small corner of the world. They belonged together, making the year of the dog.
