SamadhiMuse

This web site contains poetry. Mostly, it is mine though a few other pieces have found their way into it as well; things which others have written for me – or things that I’ve particularly liked.

The opening page, which you are now reading, is a static page. I.e., it doesn’t change much. It is intended as an introduction and an orientation to new people who’ve just discovered the site.

Discussion about the blog, itself, as opposed to the poetry on it, can be found under the special category, “About this site“. Here you will find you will find stuff about this site and its day to day evolution (such as when new features are added or changes are made to how something works).

I’ve been writing poetry since I was in High School in the 1960′s. Initially, it was a way to express powerful emotions I had bottled up inside of me. Where I grew up was a blue-collar sort of a place and letting folks know that you were sensitive was a liability. As the years went by, the poetry remained an outlet for me but it also became a type of an emotional diary for me.

I’ve noticed for many many years, when I read back over my stuff, that some poems were better than others. Some spoke to me as strongly years later as they did the day I wrote them. But others suffered badly over time. I began to watch my process to see what made some poems better than others.

And watching yourself this way is an utterly delicate process because self-consciousness, itself, is a major cause of what can mar a piece. I discovered though that when I wrote, I needed to get out of the way and remove the judgmental mind, and even the tendency to watch the process, from the action of writing and just let the emotions I was feeling drive the pen.

As a secondary matter, I also found out that referring to things my readers couldn’t know about made for poems that were meaningless to them regardless of what they might mean to me.

When I read a lot of my earlier stuff now, in truth, it makes me cringe. There are months of stuff here in places where I was caught up in some angst or other and I just spewed on about it for weeks.

But, there are also places where real magic happened. Places where, though raging with emotion, I managed to find the exquisite balance between feeling and standing to the side. And during such moments, I watched some beautiful and amazing things flow from my pen.

It is some of these latter poems that strike me as strongly today as the day I wrote them. As if the very essence of those moments so long ago were captured, indelible, in the words.

At some point in the not too distant future, as a kindness to my readers, I intended to go through the entire body of work and rate it into Recommended, OK and Skip categories. It’ll allow an interested reader to skim through what I recommend and pass on the rest.

A logical question might be, “Why don’t you just suppress all the bad work and only put out your best?“. I suppose I could but I choose to store my work electronically and I want to keep it all in one place. And, this WordPress Blog and the backups I make from of it, are that place. Besides, this site is at least as much for my pleasure as it is for anyone else’s who cares to come here and wade in my past. And all of what’s here – whether good of bad to other reader’s sensibilities – has value to me – because it represents the stories of my life.

As we go forward, I will, of course, continue to add new work to this site and to correct and adjust the existing work on it. Please note that everything you find on this site is Copyright, Dennis Gallagher and may not be used without my express permission.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I welcome your comments and suggestions.

Best wishes,

Dennis Gallagher