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"Old Soldier" A Poem by Mark This is my first Villanelle, a format I discarded a decade ago, as the repe..

Lessons My Dog Taught Me... and .. A Book by Mark

What Texas Lacks A Poem by Mark

Snowbound Morning A Poem by Mark

Refreshed A Poem by Mark

Bettah Dan I Knew I Could! A Poem by Mark

TO HAVE, AND NOT HOLD A Poem by Mark

MY GHOST A Poem by Mark

"M" PLANTS A Poem by Mark

A Tattered Tatting A Poem by Mark

BEE MOVIE A Poem by Mark

I'm 55, but started writing when I was about sixteen...for a girl, of course!
Having lost my first wife to cancer, and my last home to Katrina, I am now happily remarried for 2 years to a lovely woman I met on Match.com. We live on sixteen acres in Jefferson, Texas. It's my first stint as a country boy, and I'm getting the hang of it okay, I guess.
I'm a strong advocate of the old values: Rhyme and Meter. You're simply not a poet, if all you do is transcribe what you're feeling at the moment--you're a reporter. Pretty fonts, nifty graphics, queer line length do NOT a poem make! Poetic License is cool, no doubt, and frequently handy, but you have to KNOW the Rules before you can BREAK the Rules: learn spelling, grammar, syntax, all that boring old junk they poke at you in school. You will NEVER become a great writer without them! Above all, read, Read, READ!
I strongly encourage beginning writers to save EVERYTHING you write, no matter how bad it seems at the moment. If nothing else, it will be good for a laugh twenty years on, but occasionally you can take a piece of drivel and rework it! Also, write on paper; computers crash, buttons get hit accidentally, stuff you really liked just disappears. It won't if you write it on paper.