The Poet's Favorites

Editing is a much more difficult job than writing. This book began with about twelve hundred pages of manuscript that had to be winnowed to about two hundred pages. To make things even more difficult I titled the book The Poet's Favorites only to discover that everything I ever wrote was one of my favorites. Poems are a bit like children. You love them even if they are really bad. Nevertheless they must be disciplined even if ever so gently. So a lot of my favorites have ended on the cutting room floor. Maybe one of your favorites met a similar fate. What I am saying is, this wasn't easy. I also want to dispel any notion that these are my best poems. "Favorites" are not necessarily the best. Part of my editorial ruthlessness was to eliminate very long poems for the most part. I wanted the book to be very readable. I also omitted most of the philosophical work, having discovered in myself a sometimes tedious redundancy. And likewise I tried to eliminate poems that were embarrassingly personal or ego centric. I trust that what is left are some of my more creative verses and some of the most readable and universal. I hope the reader will be pleased.