The Days of Wine & Roses revisited

Not a film review, but rather an introduction to my new blog project!

A caveat: this involves the continuing Sturm und Drang, or at least soap opera, saga of John Hayes & writing poetry. Because long-time readers are all-too familiar with this story, I won’t re-hash it—if you’re interested in background, you might check out a couple of previous posts here & here.

Not so long ago, blogger Premium T posted about how poetry is a form of prayer for her. I found the post quite moving, & it brought me again to think of my own on-again off-again relationship with poetry over the last dozen years, which followed over twenty years of immersion in the poetic arts.

T’s post simply reinforced thoughts or convictions that have been much in my mind & heart of late: that I need to make some peace with poetry &, if possible, get back to writing it again. Experience tells me that in order to do this, I need to interact with my own writing. So as a result, I’m beginning The Days of Wine & Roses (all poetry, all the time – poems by yrs truly). The blog title is also the title of the poetic manuscript I’ve had kicking around in various states for close to 20 years; part of my hope for the new blog is that it will spur me to self-publish this manuscript as I’d planned earlier this year.

I’ll be posting a poem a week, each Sunday morning, tho for this week’s kick-off I’m posting two! My plan is to post the poems in the order they appear in the manuscript, & the first two are the title poem (which appeared previously on Robert Frost's Banjo) & “The Revenge of the Baby Sax.”

A couple of quick notes: While in San Francisco & Charlottesville, I wrote some long poems that fall outside the typical length format of a blog. When I was posting original poems on Robert Frost’s Banjo, I had no intention of posting these here since they ranged in length from three to over 10 pages (& frankly, individual poems don’t serialize well!) However, I will be posting these poems on The Days of Wine & Roses unabridged, unserialized, & in the manuscript order.

Second: if/when new poems come along, I’ll post them on The Days of Wine & Roses, then resume the sequence of the manuscript as soon as is practical.

& finally, the disclaimer: my poems from San Francisco in particular used words from many aspects of the language, including language some might conceivably find offensive. The poems aren’t peppered with off-color language, but some are at least lightly salted.

Hope to see some of you today & on future Sundays on The Days of Wine & Roses.

& now back to our regularly scheduled programming….