Footnotes

For more than sixty years, I’ve felt the occasional need to write poetry for no discernible reason. I suppose it was simply my way of venting; getting things off my chest, because the works are all associated with events, memories or ideas about which I am passionate.

Until recently, I never shared my poetry with anyone, not even my wife whom I married fifty-five years ago. Many of the poems have disappeared over the years, some of which undoubtedly deserved their fate, but I was satisfied with most of the survivors and even proud of a few.

I suppose it was inevitable, given my age, that I would begin thinking seriously about my mortality. To that end – pun intended – I had my will updated, pre-arranged my funeral, and purchased a burial plot. Then, less than a year ago, I decided to search the nooks and crannies of my office to gather the surviving poems together. Some were handwritten among stacks of papers in my office closet, while others were typed and stuffed into a filing cabinet. The majority, however, were Word documents that had been written on computers no longer in use, but which had been transferred to the laptop I was using at the time.

Because the meanings of some poems might escape my heirs, I added footnotes to a handful of the works. Ultimately, I assembled fifty-one poems and, on a whim, sent them off to my publisher – footnotes and all. To my surprise, he asked me to write footnotes for every poem and advised that he intended to publish the entire collection. Over the next several weeks, I wrote footnotes, designed a cover using on one of my own photographs, and signed a publishing agreement with Rock’s Mills Press.

Various titles occurred to me as the work progressed, but none of them seemed quite right. Then it suddenly occurred to me that "footnotes" not only described the words beneath the poems, but each of the poems served as a footnote to my life.

So, on October 1st 2020, my third book, Footnotes, “poems of loss, the passage of time & mortality” will become available. Copies can be obtained at Amazon, at Rock’s Mills Press, and through my own website, www.davidjforsyth.com.