ManicDDaily

This is just an imagined image– I don’t think it really looks like Dave–I’m not a portraitist–but I just did it to express affection.

When you read someone’s poetry, you cannot help but get a sense of their personality.  Poetry tends towards the personal.  “Blogged” poetry (posted so quickly after initial creation) is perhaps even more personal.  Often the blogging poet does not have the time, or the wish, to insert the levels of separation that might arise from extended periods of revising, sticking into a drawer, revising again.

There are some  poets you get to know even better than others–not necessarily because the poets are confessional.  These poets just have “friendly” voices.  When you read their work, you feel like you are sitting down with them over a cup of tea.  Often they share something  that is even more warming than the virtual hot drink–they share enthusiasm, passion, determination, wonder–a vision and a voice–their truest selves.

Dave King, a poet who blogged at http://picsandpoems.blogspot.com, was one of these friendly voices.  You understood reading his poetry that this was a good man.  His death was just announced by his family on his blog yesterday;  I, and many in the online poetry community, have been terribly saddened by this news.

Dave’s work was insightful and clever.  Some of my favorite pieces are the sketches he wrote about village life in England when he was growing up (around the time of World War II).  The sketches are simply so much fun–they recreate this world–its rich quirkiness–its kindness and harshness, its quintessential Britishness–

Dave also wrote a lot of poetry exploring nature, physics, rather deep philosophical questions.  He wrote about people for whom he had cared–his students, his friends, especially his wife.

He had a wonderful visual sense–he occasionally posted a painting he had made, and wrote  about the act of painting, also about the act of seeing.

Dave also used his wonderful poetic voice to support the work of others.  His comments buoyed me up many many times when I just wasn’t sure that posting my poems was worth the effort.

Please do go check out his wonderful work.  The last pieces, written in sickness, are transformative.

Finally–I never met Dave–I’ve seen just a small picture of him.  So I know the above, meant to be a younger Dave, does not truly look like him, and I really hope the drawing doesn’t offend anyone.  (I’m not terribly good at portraits.)  My thought was just to illustrate the way a face becomes part of one’s context of the world–even a face one only sees in a little corner of a blog post–how strange it is how these creative online exchanges can reach across ocean and skies all the way to hearts and minds–

(I am linking this up to dVerse Poets Pub where Brian Miller has made a small homage to Dave today.)