I must confess. The previous poems (the ones I turned in for the ballad and William Blake assignments) are old works of mine.

I simply didn't feel like writing any new stuff. That takes some thinking, and lately, I haven't had much time for that. Right now, the only thinking I do is between classes, when I'm walking from one campus to another or from car to class or from class to car, or right before or after work or piano lessons.

Anyway, I used to write poetry a lot. I've never really written anything seriously, with conscious awareness of meter and feet. Only a few times have I done that--once with a mock epic poem I called "Trendy Gal" and another with a really, really bad sonnet.

Ballads I never knew about, but I looked through my little book of poems and discovered that--hey--I wrote one or two of those without even knowing. I'm talking, of course, about "Spectators" and another one--which I didn't include--called "Don't Tell Me."

Since I didn't really know what I was doing when I wrote those long ago, I broke the lines up somewhat strangely. For instance, in "Don't Tell Me," instead of

4 feet a
3 feet b
4 feet c
3 feet b

or even

7 feet a
7 feet a

I wrote it in this way:

2 feet a
2 feet b
2 feet c
1 foot d

2 feet e
2 feet f
2 feet g
1 foot d

I know, I know. Pretty strange. But "Spectators" was even stranger. It wasn't even uniform; it was written like it was free verse or something. I just wrote it as it flowed from my mind--kind of erratic, with line breaks everywhere. Then I left it like that--no revision; I hardly ever revise... It felt really weird re-writing it in strict ballad form.

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