The poems in
The Massacre Confirmed Our Worst Suspicions
were written over a 25-year period between about 1993 and 2018. They were written as they came to me. Where they came from I have no idea. Something strikes me, bugs me for a period of time, and gets written as a kind of relief. The poems seem, to me, to be a curious mixture of whimsy, longing and outrage about the passage of time, memory, relics, unrequited love and death. Most of them, if not all, are more or less objective, or attempt to be. This is because of a conscious effort by me to strip personal pronouns from my poems. The damn things get in the way. They say, in effect, that the poet has had some ultra-special experience that the reader can't possibly have had, and that the poet, in her or his magnanimity, has deigned to bestow them on less special people. I think of myself as a reporter whose reporting just happens to take the form of poems.