Still Growing

EPIGRAPH:
In the history of the world, a whole story has never been told.
--Meghan Daum

I chose the epigraph above because no matter how thoroughly and completely I try to communicate with my readers through my poems, inevitably the "whole story" doesn't get told. Not only would others involved in the poems have their own takes on the episodes, my own take is limited to my perceptions at the moment when I wrote the poem and then submitted it for publication. Even now as I look back on some of my early work, I see how I would write from a different perspective if I were to write about the same episode now. So, the epigraph is neither a boast nor a complaint. It's a statement of fact. The subjects of most of my poems are drawn from the incidents and episodes of my life. The poems are arranged in five sections chronologically according to the period of my life they refer to. The sections are labelled according to where I was living at the time. Thus, Pennsylvania where I grew up and went to college, Kansas where I went to graduate school, Long Island I where I moved after I'd completed my course work and got a full-time teaching position, Manhattan where I lived in the 1980s, and finally Long Island II which I moved back to in 1991 and where I reside today.