Twisted Hipster: Poetry by Stephen Fife

These poems were originally written when I was between the ages of 15-18 or 22-27. I m now sixty and have a much different world-view and sense of self than I did then. In a few cases, this has resulted in my making some significant changes to a poem such as The Hobo, in which an entire stanza is new and some of the language is retouched, because in going back to it now, with all my subsequent experience of being an outsider in hard times, it simply resonated with me on a completely new level. I mean, the idea of poverty still had lots of romantic appeal to me at 16; at 60, after years of struggling to make the rent, not so much.
Questions may arise, I suppose, about why I stopped writing poetry at 18 for four years and then stopped again for almost 35 years; and then why go back to these poems now? Most of the answers are contained in the memoir I recently finished writing, THE 13th BOY, which details the destructive relationships I had with my two high school poetry teachers at Horace Mann. One teacher in particular drove me to the brink of suicide, and I had to stop writing for those four years in order to preserve my sanity. I had a Federal poetry grant when I was 25, which allowed me to support myself for 18 months while continuing to write and give poetry readings. The end of the grant coincided with my getting married. Needing money, I turned away from poetry to other forms of writing that I hoped would provide me with a living wage.
I had originally gone back to these screams into the canyon of oblivion in order to compile one volume of selected poems. But the more I worked on them, the more I found that they divided into two separate mindsets: these poems, which are more urban and experiential in nature; and others which I have grouped together in a companion volume titled DREAMING IN THE MAZE OF LOVE-GRIEF-MADNESS, and which tended to be more philosophical.