HOW TO LIVE A LIFE
The poem "How To Live A Life" was originally conceived and written as a collaboration with printmaker Dale Devereux Barker in 2002. It was published and produced by Dale as a limited (20) edition art book, and was a very beautiful object. It can be seen online here.
Not surprisingly, very few people have actually ever seen it in real life, and the poem was otherwise unpublished. I had kind of always seen the poem as part of that art object, and time passed. Then The Argotist invited me to publish a collection in 2010 and I decided to re-publish the poem alongside other poems that had only appeared in various magazines. So it's reprinted here in full, along with the original foreword and introduction.
Of the other poems assembled, they're poems that for one reason or another did not make it into other collections. When I publish a book, which is not often, I try to ensure that it's a cohesive whole and not just a rag-bag assemblage. This necessarily excludes certain poems for no other reason than that they don’t seem to fit. Some of those excluded poems are here. And some poems have been left out of this collection, too, for the same reason. It doesn’t matter. There are lots of poems in the world already, and sometimes I wonder whether we should be adding to the number. But we do. I do.
Read How to Live a Life here.