Poetic Sense and Nonsense

Poetic Sense and Nonsense

by

Eugene R. Moutoux

Coffee or tea

And some poetry

Metamorphose hours

Into minutes

My modus operandi in writing most of these poems was to select ten words, proximate alphabetically but randomly grouped with respect to meaning, from the group of "impressive" words that I require my high-school juniors to learn. These ten words usually suggested a possible topic. Then I wrote the first two lines, almost never knowing at this point exactly where the poem was going. I find it amazing that, as a writer, you don’t have to know what you are going to say when you begin; somehow ideas present themselves in the course of writing. My self-imposed task was to use all ten words, and at first I did not allow myself to write more than 14 lines. The latter condition was dropped after ten or so poems as altogether too limiting; the former, too, had to bite the dust when, in rereading the poems, I discovered that I had forced words from the list to do what other words could do better. I hope that you enjoy my poems. Please let me know what you think. Thanks.