Inscapes

I have always loved poetry-reading it and writing it. During an active teaching career, I was busy with teaching, course development, and writing critical literary articles. Now and then, there was a winged urge to write a poem-and I did. In retirement, I got busy with deep research into the life of Mahatma Gandhi's wife, Kasturba Gandhi. Then, too, the spontaneous urge to write poems continued.

A variety of outward, remembered, visual, or contemplative stimuli triggered the writing of a poem. Outward stimuli take me into inward journeys, so I call them inscapes-not landscapes, seascapes, or escapes, but inward journeys of the soul.

For me, a poem begins spontaneously from the heart. Then, pondered upon and augmented with detail, it finds its own prosodic form. Sometimes it is expressed in free verse, sometimes in stanzaic form. Occasionally, it is a haiku. No matter what the content of a poem happens to be, for me, it is a spiritually uplifting experience-a happy one.

As for my line drawings, they are spontaneous too, expressing my love of life. In between the poems, I have also placed some of my line drawings, which, I believe, enhance the pleasure of the reading.