About Me

Well, since you're here, dear reader, you might as well know a bit about me.

Background:
My name's Caleb Johnson. I'm a poet. I've been a poet since the age of 13, when I began to read and write poetry as a serious pastime. The first poets I read with enthusiasm were John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walt Whitman, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I would often write in imitation of their styles, though these first attempts were predictably rather poor. 

Yet these first attempts, however rudimentary they might have been, only served to inspire me to write more and more. I read a lot of Modernist poetry, and to this day I still abide by T.S. Eliot's dictum, "No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job." Meaning that even if you eschew traditional rhyme and meter, you still need some pattern or structure for your poem to work within in order for it to make sense and not be just a bunch of words haphazardly thrust onto a page.

Personal Stuff:
I'm bisexual, but I much prefer men, both romantically and sexually. Ergo, I explore my homosexual desires in much of my poetry, and that poetry can be erotically charged, and sometimes more explicit about it than not. If you find this sort of thing objectionable (and I don't see why you would), don't say I didn't give you fair warning first.

I also tend to wax political sometimes. Be assured that I'm not some far-right or far-left loony who thinks everyone to the left/right of me is a demon that needs exorcising from this world. I'm a blend of different ideologies: I share some traditional conservative views, some libertarian views, some social democratic views, and I tend to fall in the center on most of the political persuasion tests I've taken. Political life, though, doesn't really appeal to me right now (in the US, at least) because people are too busy pearl-clutching and moaning in mass hysteria to get any real work or compromise done. Sad state of affairs, really.

Anywho, that's enough about me for now. I hope that you will come to see me as a friend, dear reader, in the course of this blog's voyage to parts unknown and paths untraveled.

Cheers!

Caleb