Strangerous

About Strangerous

Foreword Often as I survey the volumes of verse comprising the Strange canon, or as I browse through fan mail or simply admire a sunrise from the deck of my motor yacht, the 'Poetaster,' I marvel at my good fortune as a poet. Other times, perhaps while watching sunsets, I shudder at the thought of what might have been. What might have become of me, for instance, had I not, at age twenty-two, published 'Freedom’s Slaves,' my first epic poem? What if I had become entangled romantically before finding my voice as a poet? What if I had been forced to get a job, as a teacher, say, or a salesman or lawyer? Such are the nightmares out of which these 'Would-Be Poems' were born. As I imagined the poet I might have been, it occurred to me that despite the material success, the honors, and the fame that luck and poetry have brought me, this less fortunate poet and I shared an essential kinship in our compulsion to write poems. Certain thecreative impulse would remain as irrepressible for this hypothetical poet as it has for me, I conceived the notion of projecting myself in his situation and recreating, in a collection of poems such as he might write, his experience as a person and as a poet. I imagined the emotional conditions of a life in which bad luck, poor decisions, and practical considerations have continually thwarted the impulse to write poetry. Such a person would be torn between the life of poetry and the life of economy. His tedious days on the job would fade to frantic midnights scribbling versified grunts in a spiral notebook. Rarely would he manage to sustain enough creative energy to produce anything other than short lyric poems, sonnets, and monologues, and most of these would prove barely more accomplished than his first adolescent efforts. After a few hours composing several dozen odd poems, I realized I had no clue what it was like to be, of all things, a “would-be” poet. I had always been an actual poet, and as we know, quite a successful one. Yet, thanks no doubt to what one critic has described as my “peculiar perspicacity,” I had managed to mimic the voice of some imaginary would-be poet to produce these would-be poems. I found and still find many of them inane and distasteful and would have scrapped the project, but I could not bring myself to deprive my audience of my creations, even in the guise of a fictional would-be poet’s mere would-be poems. So I resolved to complete the project. In quest of some structure which might lend a measure of unity and coherence to the bizarre assortment of poems before me, I happened upon the work of a psychologist, Erik Erikson. Erikson’s eight stages of psychosocial development described in his 'Childhood and Society' (1963) struck me as a particularly appropriate scheme for making sense of a life comprising a host of little poems. According to Erikson, individuals experience a “developmental crisis,” or conflict between healthy versus unhealthy alternatives, during each of eight stages spanning infancy through old age. Although sequential, the stages are interdependent and cumulative to the extent an individual’s resolution of earlier crises may develop during later stages or may impact the individual’s resolution of subsequent crises. Suffice to say, the poems in this volume soon divided into eight chapters roughly corresponding to the eight stages in the would-be poet’s life. I am not unaware of the popular sentiment that deprivation and obscurity foster creativity. And while it may be easy enough to cite dozens of examples in support of this hypothesis, I am, fortunately, an example of its opposite. Never have I known, and never will know, what it feels like to be an uncelebrated poet. One thing is certain, however, as these would-be poems attest: but for my fame and fortune, I would not be quite the poet my readers and I have come to expect. J.S. Gulf of Mexico, 14 March 2001