I have strived to make these so-called poems accessible & useful to
- common & uncommon people
- the elect & the left-behind
- the healthy & the injured or ill
- the confident & the diffident
- those cruising along & those daunted & baffled
- the technically adept & the technically timid & clumsy
- medical professionals & medicine men or women
- policy-makers, would-be policy-makers, & those trying to comply with or get away with not complying with policy
- executives, clerks, operators of equipment, links in logistic chains
- farmers, those who supply them; or aggregate, process, & distribute their crops’ derivative products
- home-makers
- maintenance personnel
- students & teachers
- warriors & competitors of every sort, & on every side of every battle or competition; & those in retreat from battles & competitions
- the well-equipped & poorly-equipped
- entrepreneurs scrupulously attempting to provide what others can advantageously use at prices minimized by their efficiency
- lawyers attempting to be knights of justice or guides for the perplexed in the maze of rules & regulations
- serious sifters of information seeking better solutions
- campaigners totally wise, & campaigners no wiser than most people most of the time, or even less wise
- the wealthy, the poor
- women, men, girls, boys
- the relatively experienced & inexperienced
- the relatively compromised & the relatively free from compromise with established oppression
- those who struggle to live lives of devotion
- those whose devotion is to liberating scepticism
- those who give orders, & those who must, or feel they must obey
- those on the verge of dying for failure so far to find roles that allow them to contribute & survive & maybe thrive among those currently getting paid enough or a lot
- poets & non-poets
- artists & performers of all sorts & their audiences & sceptics & critics.
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Poetry is, I know, terribly underestimated, & the poets want all the allies they can get.
But becoming capable of, & managing occasionally to do good & great & necessary deeds, is even more terribly underestimated.
I appreciate the attention & praise of other poets as much as any, I suppose, but I write poetry, as I do other things, actually to change the course of human events for the better.
I’m well aware of the odds against that outcome, & of how slight what I am doing is, in relation to what I intend to affect.
I hope you will find these so-called poems of real, tho peculiar use.
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I have not tried to make them accessible to those who have become great predators, nor those who have become comfortable parasites. Both the predators & parasites have reciprocated & more than reciprocated, in blocking my initiatives whenever & however they are in a position to do so.
In fact, they began blocking me even before I initiated anything—when I began among the uninitiating—those whose coping, with circumstances they only partially comprehended, consumed all their initiative.
I live among such people now. I’m frequently one such myself.
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“…how the same inexorable price must still be paid for the same great purchase.” —Walt Whitman
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Teresinka Pereira, whose primary language isn’t English, has asked me what “tho” means in the so-called poems:
tho = though.
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Choosing & as precisely as possible imagining goals, allocating resources & responsibilities, scheduling the sequences of necessary steps, monitoring results along the way, adjusting to forces you were previously unaware of, or that were formed in response to your beginning your deed, to obstruct its getting done—these components of achievement are well mapped out in a thousand books on strategic management. But what will you (or I) attempt, what will you (or I) manage?
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Not only for this or that group who are suffering from misunderstanding & injustice, but for EVERYONE who is suffering from misunderstanding & injustice.
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John Bennett, Washington State (USA) novelist:
“ERIC … it’s like you don’t write poems, but social-concern tracts that in their relentless sincerity, border on being poetry….”
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Cuban poet Jose Francisco de Asis Garcia:
“Luego de leer estos versos, tiernos y aciclonados a la vez, no te queda otra alternativa que levantar tu justa voz junto a la vigorosa del poeta o resignarte a ser, por los siglos de los siglos, un poeta sin opinion.”
(“Reading these poems, tender yet cyclonic, you can’t but raise your just voice together with the poet’s, or resign yourself to being, century after century, neutral.”)
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The late Hugh Fox—Los Angeles & Michigan, USA-based novelist, poet, & publicist for the otherwise forgotten, ancient, global Sea People:
“You’re an honest-to-God CLASSIC, up there on Classic mountain with Whitman, Bukowski…all the Forever Poets!”
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Vienna, Austria poet Kurt Svatek:
“They are really thought provoking and so full of humanity. To help some body and to get help – what a great theme.”
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This web-site was previously called “Eat Some, Plant Some” & “100 So-Called Poems.”
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Picture: NOAA
