Reader please supply meaning

I began writing poetry when I was thirteen. It was less of an expression of teenage angst and more a way to get my name in the school magazine. The angst came later and, when it did, poetry seemed the obvious way to channel it although at the time I was keen to be a composer and even dabbled with painting for a bit. But the words won in the end.

Looking back on them it's obvious what motivated me in fact more than anything the collection reads like a coded diary. I wrote about my relationships, programmes I'd watched on TV, politics surprisingly, religion and, more than anything else, man's place in the universe or at least in society. Most of my early efforts are dire but, looking back as objectively as I can, there were signs right from the very first poem that words were my medium. I was surprised to find how young I was when I wrote 'Burns Statue After Dark' in which a drunk lambasts the image of The Bard, the closest thing I ever wrote to Hugh MacDiarmid's, 'A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle', though significantly shorter. Several years later I returned to the subject in 'Burns Monument After Dark' though this time I kept my narrator sober.

By the late nineteen-seventies I had found my voice — a short, punchy style — and my work was appearing regularly in the small-press magazines which were legion at the time: Iota Quarterly, Sepia, Exile, The Third Half, Bogg, Effie, Northern Line, Inkshed First Time, Works, The Urbane Gorilla, Words, Psychopoetica, Purple Patch, Ludd's Mill, The Old Police Station, Paladin and these are just the ones I can find copies of, pretty much all dead and gone. But with the break-up of my marriage I became disillusioned and hardly sent out anything for years. By the early nineteen-nineties I had stopped writing completely.

After a gap of three years — a pretty miserable period without my writing to fall back on — I turned to prose, writing the drafts of two novels in quick successions. In time the poetry came back.

My output over the last ten to twelve years has not been great. Often months go by with nothing but when my muse does strike the quality is high. Little has been published from this period, a few online and a couple in magazines. The reason, and this has been the spectre that has overshadowed my writing for years, has been working in jobs that demanded more of me that they had any right to and left precious little for anything else. Things have improved in the past few months and I'm determined to see my name in print on a regular basis from now on. A good things poems don't go off.