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    Enlightenment and other trifles: poems
    Enlightenment and other trifles: poems
    Enlightenment and other trifles: poems
    Ebook21 pages11 minutes

    Enlightenment and other trifles: poems

    By Cameron Gordon

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    About this ebook

    This is a collection of poems written over the course of two decades, with a few new ones written especially for this collection. Their theme is the ruminations and wanderings of the mind, sometimes beautiful, sometimes crazy, often mysterious. Those mental emanations can yield openings, more often closings and random static. I've tried to capture a bit of each in the poems, organizing them under two headings to capture both the sublime and the mundane (profane?) aspects of thinking.

    I could say that these poems are travel notes of a voyager who has bumped his head against his own mind multiple times and sometimes says "ouch", other times "help", and yet other times, "ahhh". Or maybe these can be considered as one person's liner notes for the sometimes discordant and always circuitous record album of psychological and spiritual growth and retrogression. Or...well, it doesn't matter. It isn't easy being human, caught between the earth and the heavens and not knowing which direction to pull or push in, or whether to pull or push in the first place.

    But at least we can write poetry. And that is no small consolation.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCameron Gordon
    Release dateNov 17, 2015
    ISBN9781311175113
    Enlightenment and other trifles: poems
    Author

    Cameron Gordon

    More will be revealed. My watchword. My life. Like everyone else's life. I am nothing special. Just a writer who embraced the craft, the art and the vocation relatively late in life, with later better than never. I have had two careers up to now, the first as a policy researcher, analyst and report writer in government (in the US) and the second as an academic lecturer and researcher (in the US, Australia, China, Singapore, Russia, Spain and the UK). These careers have been creative in their own way and have involved a lot of writing. But it took me a long while in that rather plush wilderness to embrace the identity that I have always known, and practised 'on the side', namely artist. That's a rather pompous term to be sure, but for me it simply is devotion to one's craft, putting it first, and giving it form on a regular and daily basis. To quote the poet W.S. Merwin, who visited Ezra Pound to get this advice: "...it was important to regard writing as not a chance or romantic or inspired (in the occasional sense) thing, but rather a kind of spontaneity which arises out of discipline and continual devotion to something." (p. 318, Good Poems for Hard Times", Keillor, Garrison (ed), Viking: 2005). That is why I have left my former work behind and embarked on the writing life full-time. I write both poetry (haiku in the beginning and now other forms as well), short stories, novellas and novels, and plays. I also write creative non-fiction. I have a play in early development with the Street Theatre in Canberra, Australia (where I now live as a former native New Yorker) and two poetry books nearing completion. I am currently also editing a collection of my short stories and am reworking a first (unpublished) novel. I blog regularly on a number of platforms. My themes seem to focus on two major things: the life of cities and the tension between humanity and mechanisation. But, of course, I cover a wide range of topics, as most people do as they live a daily life and the days accumulate into experience.

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