Of Visions n, Memories

About the Book

I struggle to master the life of a poet, the world of rows of words, the monosyllabic titles spat from a poet’s tongue. My brain clenched in a haze in the short minutes before midnight, sore from laborious changes of several rewritings and rewritings, “the story of a poet’s life.” My inspirations! a snatch of melody from out of the night or private words accidently overheard, something I caught a glimpse of nearby or in the distance, and in those many words we borrow, a diagnosis of each with accents wrong, probably. Words siphoning through the ears, in a confusion of options, as if such gatherings were needed. This is my life of make-believe, a world of unconfirmed, uncontrolled direction, “this life of the poet.”

About the Author

Richard Smith (Writer and Poet) Richard Smith is a veteran of the Korean War. He has been a resident of Enfield, Connecticut, for the past fifty-two years. He went to the Asnuntuck Community College for a number of semesters for computer systems training. He has been teaching and coaching seniors to use computers at the Enfield Senior Center for the past eleven years. He has been writing poetry since 1985 and did his first four open mikes in Las Vegas in 1987. He has read at Asnuntuck for more than sixteen years now and on Pittsfield Community TV for twelve years and at a variety of libraries, book stores, and coffee shops over the years. He has been published three times in FreshWater and in twenty-nine anthologies and has had more than one hundred poems on the Internet over the years. This is his first publication.