James Scofield is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared throughout the United States, and in England, Canada, and India. He began writing 30 years ago, and wrote each day for 6 years, producing only 26 poems, all of which he destroyed. In the seventh year he finished "Festival", which was then published by Bellowing Ark of Seattle, Washington. During the remaining years he has written 30 poems which he has wished to keep, and those poems make up this, his first book of poems.
Throughout 30 years he has written with the enduring belief that poems should possess a rhetorical surge and a mythopoeic posture, poems that sprung into presence and stand there, as Czeslaw Milosz said, "blinking and lashing their tails."
55 and Losing
My collection of moments had a hole in the bottom,
the fertility of order dribbled away.
Time, his kids sprawling and spawning, joked,
"Soon you will stop losing ground and gain ground!"
Seventeen coats of lacquer on a '46 Chevy,
girls with sandy feet and high-flying bikes,
frying lust, garden veggies and rope swings,
all poor fish now, all alike dissolving.
From out of the center the gurney wheels roll.
Now that awful moment of a moment's surrender.
[guess he wasn't very prolific, just a little slow
or over and over the same, day after day the same, over and over the same o!o! losing it.,
G'nite]
6 years every day= 2190days/ 26 poems =84 days per poem
hope he wasnt doing that for a living. and then he threw them away.
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