Rimbaud packed it in before he turned 21Rimbaud packed it in before he turned 21
In November of 1975 I was 17 years old and began writing poetry. The following year I had four of my poems published in two very obscure magazines. In 1978 I had another published in another very obscure magazine. It was another ten years before I had another poem published, again in an obscure magazine, this one in the United Kingdom. And in 1990 I had another poem published: magazine again obscure.
Those seven poems are the previously published works I’m posting this week. They were all written before I was twenty years old. Nearly everything else I wrote in those early scribbling days when the Vietnam War was still freshly lost and the nation was anesthesizing itself with drugs, sex, rock-and-roll and King Disco, has long since been thrown away and good riddance to it. I would hate to think someone would have to wade through that garbage to sort it out after I die.