Hello, my dear digital friends. Céad míle fáilte! ☘️
Freedom from Lockdown?
I felt such a vast emptiness, an un-fulfillment, inside of me when the Covid lockdown began in 2020.
Not because of the virus. But because, as I soon realized, I had hollowed out a part of my soul when I abandoned writing 25 years earlier to support my new (and young!) family.
This marked slowdown in my relentlessly hectic lifestyle of living on airplanes and wining/dining clients had created a space… a silent, ruminative absence… with newfound time for listening.
A void that sadly could no longer be filled by a winning personality and boyish good looks. 🙄
My Muses, muted for far too long, eagerly reclaimed their voices. They filled that absence of business busy-ness with words and images that HAD TO BE expressed.
Much like Horton, I heard their soft-yet-urgent Who-voices. We are here. We are here.
Learning, Reading, & Writing – oh my!
That’s where my journey of the last few years began. First through social media, where I developed a large audience for my poetry on Twitter and Facebook. Making connections, publishing some works, networking with critics and allies alike.
Learning, learning, learning. I cannot tell you how many hours I have spent studying my craft. Thus, I can now identify as a New Romantic Transcendental Post-Modern Formalist. My fellow lit nerds will hopefully appreciate this new movement I am beginning. Starting today. NRTPMF should last about a week.
Reading, reading, reading. Oh, the brilliant words I have read. I adore lyrical language. For me, poetry is soulful song. A prayer. A psalm. A paean. And to experience, bone-deep, the brilliance of other poets brings a tear to my eye. Fills me with awe and admiration.
Some of my favs? Well, since you asked… John Keats, WB Yeats, TS Eliot, Carl Sandburg, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein, Anne Sexton, Pablo Neruda, Seamus Heaney, Marilyn Hacker, and Molly Peacock…to name just a few.
And writing, writing, writing. Constantly creating and expressing. Experimenting with free verse, strict formalism, and everything in between… always looking to sustain my own unique voice. And, I believe, since I am a lifelong drummer, an inherent sense of rhythm and meter in much of my poetry.
I have written 500+ poems in the last few years. Some quite good. Some needing encouragement. Others needing a swift burial in an unconsecrated grave.
50 of those 500+ poems were good enough to publish online in various lit journals and in poetry anthologies. And in that time, I whave been nominated two times for a Pushcart prize and appointed the 2024-25 Poet-in Residence for the online literary magazine The Fictional Café.
120 more poems became Echoes Lost in Stars. My first solo poetry collection. Available today on all Amazon outlets, worldwide. Pick up your copy today. 😉
A Pounding Moonlit Tide
And, above all else, dear friends, to know me you must know my forever-Muse… my funny, beautiful, intelligent, oh-so-patient wife, Susan. Her belief in me, her endless support, her unerring love. She balances my often-manic personality with her quiet calm, her fierce loyalty, her wicked charms. I love her. Full stop.
Add to that inseparable pairing our two brilliant daughters who are thriving at adulting, our fur baby Mr. Hairy Kerry Conway, and a large, loud, dysfunctional Irish-American family – and you can imagine the laughter and glorious chaos that graces our world every day.
What else can I say? I have led a blessed life. Poetry is such a wonderful outlet for expressing those often-raw, feral impulses. It evokes a wide spectrum of deep feelings from me that flow now relentlessly like a pounding moonlit tide.
Echoes Lost in Stars is structured intentionally to support that notion. From sun to sunset; from starlight to stars. Light transitioning to dark. Then turning those ideas on their head to reveal those incongruous and complex feelings assumed by those metaphors.
And let’s be honest. Can we truly appreciate the light without first understanding darkness?
Sláinte!☘️
PS Conway
