Foreword
I began writing poetry as a teenager fifty years ago and graduated from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminar in 1967 expecting to write poetry, supporting myself I knew not how. As it happened, I became a book publisher and wrote poems "on the side," publishing a number of them between 1968 and 1974 in literary journals or little magazines. But then, in the late 1970s, I turned to writing for the theater and stopped writing poetry, except for the occasional poem that seemed necessary.
Living in Boston between 2001 and 2003, I wrote a book-length poem, The Woman at the Well, which coincided with the beginning of the invasion of Iraq (a small excerpt is here). Never published, it was too long and something of a grab bag, but it led me back to writing poetry. In the years since I have written a few poems, not many, that I felt good about. I have not published any of them, although I have gathered some rejection slips.
What I have collected here is a selection of fourteen poems from the early 1970s and the past six years. The first six poems were written when I was in my late twenties; the remainder are from my late fifties and early sixties. They begin in Philadelphia and end in Portland, Oregon, where I now live. They cover a lot of ground. Nonetheless, I think that they are clearly written by the same person, however great the distance betwen the young man of 29 and the writer who turns 64 as this collection is made available on the web, primarily for my friends to read. It is a sort of gift from me to you on the occasion of one of "those" birthdays.
Among the early poems, "Beginnings" and "Cutting Out" appeared in the American Poetry Review, "Bonebag" in Poetry Northwest and the Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards volume for 1974, "Colloquy in Another Language About a Different Time" in Perspective (founded by the poet Mona van Duyn in 1947 but now, I think, defunct), and "Three Ghazals for Fortuna in The Little Magazine (not the South Asian journal but another that is either extinct or reorganized as an on-line publication). Click on each poem in the Contents list to the left to read it and click the "Back" button on your browser to return to the Contents page.
Ken Arnold, Portland, Oregon, March 22, 2008
Precipitate, collection copyright 2008, by Kenneth Arnold.
All rights reserved. Poems may be printed for individual
reading only. Contact Kenneth Arnold at ken@ken-arnold.com
for reprint rights.