Inspiration

My poems are mostly about rural life. Occasionally, other ideas intrude but not often. I moved to Corinth over Memorial Day weekend, 2012. I'd been for visits a few times prior to moving here, but that was about it. Instead, Jeanine had found Roxford after numerous trips around Harrison, Nicholas, Grant, Bourbon and Scott Counties. It was (and is) 12 acres, if not the middle of "Nowhere," a place where you can see "Nowhere." And it is absolutely gorgeous--as the poems so often demonstrate. Yet, what I like is that if you drive just 20 minutes (about 7 miles) you can be at I-75 and go almost anywhere with relative ease.

I've been a "city slicker" most of my life. Oh, I grew up on a farm--16 acres in rural Fayette Co.'s "South Elkhorn," not far from the Bluegrass Field airport. But most of my "farm work" was mowing the lawn and plucking weeds from the strawberry patch, or the flower garden--tasks I never learned to love. Occasionally, I might be prevailed upon to help a sister "muck" a horse stall or clean out a hoof "frog." But they were the riders, I was mostly a bystander. When I was a bit older,  I worked on my grandmother's farm in Clark Co. for a couple of years: throwing around hay bales, topping and cutting tobacco, and cleaning large fields of innumerable numbers of thistles. Still, I wasn't really much of a farmer--I only had the calluses that come from hard work at summer's end, never all year long. After college I moved away, living in Washington, DC before coming back to Kentucky to mostly live in ever-urbanizing Lexington.

But if I was never much of a "country boy" as a boy, young man, and middle-aged businessman-teacher-student-playwright, etc., I certainly have taken much inspiration from what I have seen around me in the distances from Roxford to Corinth in one direction and from Roxford to Cynthiana in the other. My hope is that the peace and tranquility that most of my poems inspire in me may have a similar affect on you.

Have a peaceful Sunday and a tranquil life.