Welcome to Bowling For Poetry!

A year out of college, I took a summer off to write poetry. It was 1980 and I was 23 years old. Having been graduated from Rice University the year before with a B.A. in Mathematical Sciences majoring in Computer Science (with a minor in Statistics and Numerical Analysis) and then spending a year feeding my right brain and my pocketbook as a computer programmer, I decided to feed my left brain for a while. I thought I would see if I could feed my pocketbook that way as well with the thought that if I could not, I would at least not have the regret of never having tried.

Long on dreams and short on plans, I never submitted for publication a single one of the one thousand poems that I wrote that summer. I did, however, keep them, and I have been hauling those poems around with me for the last twenty-five years. Back then I composed my poetry on an electric typewriter, one to the page, so that means I have hauled five binders full of poems through four states and four times that many apartments and houses. I did dump the binders themselves eventually, replacing them with a single box, so at least the load got lighter.

When I started writing Poem Of The Day nine years ago, it occurred to me that this would be an ideal place for those poems to finally see the light of day. And a year ago, I finally managed to get the first twenty-five of them keyed in and posted to the Web. Rather than stay with the one-poem-per-page format, I chose to place them on a single Web page; and that one page has sat alone ever since, both as promise and rebuke. A spring snowstorm, a canceled flight, and a longer trip than usual has given me the chance to add this Bowling For Poetry Home page to the collection.

Why call it Bowling For Poetry? Because every poem I write is to me like releasing a bowling ball down the lane, sometimes a gutter ball, sometimes a strike, hopefully more of the latter than the former and with most of them somewhere in between. I carry about a 160 average in bowling; I only hope to do as well here.