I was sixty-two when I first tried to write poetry, sixty-four before I dared show the result to others.

          My father’s gods were Mars and Pan. In youth so they were mine. Fighting, fornicating, serving as a mate on offshore charter boats and butchering were my skills in 1960 when, eighteen, I enrolled at LaSalle, a small, local, all male Catholic working-class college in Philadelphia. Of Pierian springs, groves of academe, the Muses’ favourites I knew nothing; writing poetry was inconceivable.

         Fail at LaSalle, as at every school since kindergarten, and I’d spend life cutting meat, the coarse trade I was apprenticed to at twelve. Shadowed by cleaver and sawdust, I attended classes for the first time without slouch or sneer. One left me rapt.

          “Maid of Athens, ere we part / Give, oh give me back my heart” beguiled me often after first reading it in our Freshman Lit sampler. Other verses joined it: “Golden lads and girls all must / As chimney-sweepers come to dust” ; “Cast a cold eye / On life on death / Horseman pass by” and on through Larkin, Ransom, Snodgrass, Lowell, Montague, more. A cascade of metres, rhymes, alliterations, assonances, apothegms and tropes from Bible to Becket distanced mean streets and chopping blocks of my minority, where every third adjective was muvvah-fuckah.

          After reading these lines in Auden’s elegy for Yeats my grail became to write one poem that might last:

          Time that is intolerant
          Of the brave and innocent
          And indifferent in a week
          To a beautiful physique
          Worships language and forgives
          All of those by whom it lives;
          Time that with this strange excuse
          Pardons Kipling and his views
          And will pardon Paul Claudel
          Pardons him for writing well.

Mittyish daydreams of a poetry career jostled with prosaic post-college futures likelier to yield a living. But the Greats’ immortal poems – Lycidas, Ode on Intimations of Immortality, Aubade – daunted me, dread of scribbling execrable verse made me cower, while the need to earn loomed large. A LaSalle English professor asked what I wanted to do on graduating? When I answered “To write”, he replied “Have you anything to say?” The answer was obvious: I shied at the first jump.

           For forty years after this exchange I made notes on scraps of paper and scrawled abortive quatrains in fly-leaves of whatever poetry collection travelled with me on business. A generation on from it I began to hope I might have something “to say”, dark though it was, and if so would say it in rhymed and metered consonants and vowels in hope of kindling in others the pounding pulse of experiences that formed and drove me.

         By 2004 those notes and snatches of verse stood a forearm high. My wealth looked likely to outlast me. A hypocrite’s reckoning was at hand: funk trying to write poetry now and accept fear and cowardice were stronger than my enduring dream. I riffled my word pile for a line or thought I might wring into a poem. Two years later I sent one of the few I was unashamed of to a letter artist to design a font for it. He asked to show it to Michael Schmidt, who after some time offered to publish me.

          While poetry I’ve published in the twenty years since escaped ridicule, none can say whether a word will survive. Sufficient for me that I tried, and to know from the occasional note from reader or friend that some in the world of outer dark, sometimes, reread a line or two.

¹ Eiswein is an intensely sweet German dessert wine made from grapes left to wither on the vine until the first sharp freeze, immediately after which they’re harvested and pressed.