About Me

I live in upstate New York. I have been writing for over 25 years, although I have lost most of what I had written before 1990. The poems on this blog are all originals. Those listed as (Undated pre-1993) were written while I was in college studying English/Elementary Education. After, I attended law school and became an attorney. I wrote regularly until 1997, thereafter unintentionally taking an 11 year hiatus. I started writing again in February 2008.

Some random thoughts on my writing.

My poems tend to be conversationalist, as if I am making an observation about something and communicating it through conversation. I have been accused of undisciplined, stream of conciousness verse – which has some validity, as they often start that way, but not completely, as they really are edited and labored over.

In general I am a fan of iambic verse, but I will as readily break it for effect as use it for effect. I also am a fan of punctuation (and capitalization) in poetry (sorry ee cummings), but I understand that those are devices to an end and I will discard them at times as well. My poems also tend to be very introspective, even when writing about someone or something else. I subscribe heavily to the school of “Every artist is a canibal, every poet is a thief” in that I borrow imagery from everywhere and will reinvent it and throw it in there – often recognizable, but not in an expected way, but I am as likely to borrow from Classical Literature and reference as I am from modern day pop culture.

My style is fairly constant at this point, although I do experiment at times – sometimes to better effect than others, but for the most part it becomes quite recognizable. I tend to write very sensually – as in the “senses” taste, touch, sight, etc. I also use a device that just kind of happend that I don’t see much of elsewhere that I describe as call and response – where I will repeat words, phrases, images, etc, in the same poem, from poem to poem. I mine my own writing very heavily and will use a similar phrasing from time to time. It kind of stresses the thematic element or the word or the idea.

Thanks for reading!

(c) 2009 Dakin Lecakes