Author Description

This collection spans 55 years in the work of Dan Valenti, one of America’s most accomplished poets and writers. In this definitive gathering, Valenti selects poems from the years covering the late 1960s up to today. These works provide personal perspectives of the times, of the people, and of the poet. DAN: Compiling this collection meant going through the contents of many hanging files, large envelopes, manuscript pages, magazines, and random jottings. Some hadn't been looked at in years. Others were more familiar. Initially, when I thought of doing this collection, I intended to present them in chronological order, the first being from 1968. This, however, proved to be time consuming (not a detriment in itself). The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the only one who needed the poems in a time context was me, and I had that already built in, since each poem conjures up a specific time in my life, and often a precise events with certain people. The time signature of a poem is indelible and usually invisible to everyone but the poet. It's probably because as a genre, there is no more intimate form of expression as a poem. The closest might be journaling, keeping a diary, but such personal scribblings aren't meant to be published. I want my poems to be published. My poems are first written as a personal reaction to some happening in my life, be it something happening to me, to someone else, or through observation of an event that -- on the surface, at least -- doesn't directly involve me (for instance, my poem about the killing of John Lennon). Then the "John Donne thing" kicks in. We are not islands. We are, perhaps, peninsulas, and everything is interconnected, what the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh called "interbeing." He said that joy can be the source of your smile, but that the smile can itself become a source of your joy. Poets know that. They probably know it even more deeply when it comes to sorrow