Poem number one in my catalogue . . .

With "Defense At Thermopylae," above—scrawled on the back of the proverbial envelope— you have the first poem in my catalogue, started in 1979. But bef

Written some ten years after ”Brief Candle,”when I began to get serious about writing, “Jocasta” plays on the story of Oedipus, who had some dicey moments with both his parents. His name means “swollen foot," so perhaps he was born with problems, too—though some say it was because his feet were pinned together when he was exposed. Once again, insistently sexual imagery. 

A third poem from my juvenilia, in the days I indulged in so-called free verse. No meter here, no rhyme—just sexual energy focused through tight imagery, with the lines corralled visually on the page. As a process, that corralling came to feel arbitrary, eventually leading to my adopting meter as an integral structure for my lines.