NOTES RE: POETRY: Dr. John WorldPeace JD

I was born in 1948 in Houston, Texas, and lived there most of my life. Between 1970-2, I was in Louisiana, Georgia, and Italy in the Army. 1993-6 in Colorado. I have lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, since 2011, and it seems unlikely that I will have a home base elsewhere in the future.

In October 1970, when I was 22, I wrote my first poem. Since then, I have written about 4000 poems in various poetic genres. My poems could be looked at as a supplement to my autobiography; one-page snap-shots of what I was thinking or experiencing at a particular moment in time.

In June 2018, I began to self-publish all the poems I have ever written in chronological order using Amazon's self-publishing software. There are about 40 poem books in total.

I have lost less than a dozen poems over the years.

Along with my free-verse poems, I have published one line (not one sentence) poems and Haiku, which are 3 line poems with 5, 7, 5 syllables per line.

My genetics and my current state of health make me confident, barring some accident, that I will live more than a few years past 100. I will continue to write poems and, in fact, will probably increase the annual volume of poems written over the rest of my life.

1) I do not force my poems. I don't write unless I feel inspired. I have no desire to set a world record for the number of poems written in a lifetime.

2) My poems are written in a couple of minutes, 2-10, then put away in a binder in chronological order. Usually, within a very few minutes after writing the poem, I have no real memory of what I wrote. This is the way it has always been for me.
The edits I make after writing a poem are minimal. Images of some of the poems in the original cursive are on my website:
https: //drjohnworldpeacejdPoetry.com

3) I do not write poems that rhyme except incidentally. I would say that I channel poems from muses in the spiritual dreamscape. It is like I am taking dictation. To force a rhyme would collapse the poem into gibberish. If I think to make a rhyming poem, I would have to be more concerned about making a rhyme instead of communicating the thoughts I receive.

4) I am not an intellectual or mechanical poet obsessed with meter, grammar, even spelling.

5) I stay away from using "we" or "you" in poems to avoid preaching.

6) I like to write words all over the page using spacing as punctuation. I paint the words as opposed to writing them.

7) I like to write in a way that makes the reader unsure of what I am saying, and therefore he or she has to slow down and think. It does not bother me to write an ambiguous poem that I understand. Writing something I don't understand would be to write gibberish. If I want to be perfectly clear about something, I will communicate it in prose. Poetry is about abstractions. Poetry is the language of abstractions. Abstract poetry allows the manipulation of logical, linear reality.

8) A poem is never really finished, the same as a work of art. I like to take a poetry book I have published and edit it a few years later. Therefore, I have no desire or need to make a poem perfect before publishing. No matter how much work I put into a poem, I would never consider it finished. Only at my death will all poems become finished.

9) Over 50 years, I kept writing. Until I submitted my complete poems (50 years of poems) to Pulitzer in October 2019, I had never entered one in a contest or for publication.
10) Judges of poems are always caught up in the past. They have built careers on the past and are closed-minded regarding avant-garde poetry.

DrJohnWorldPeaceJDPoetry.com