Peter Jerrim
I’ve been writing poems for a long time but have only recently got serious.
As a child, I was allowed to stay home from school when I pretended to be sick. This was mostly an excuse to sit up in bed and read. And tap away on my dad’s portable typewriter.
When I was 13 a singing teacher taught me how to breathe. I took off like a rocket, ran on the mountains and swam in the sea. I went mad with teenage enthusiasms. My brain didn’t settle down for decades.
75 years in lutruwita. Have I learnt anything? Only, finally, to trust my intuition. But before that I did work on mostly fun stuff – teaching, writing, healthcare ventures, databases, websites… I wrote about 14,000 pages, half of which were hypertext fiction.
But I only fiddled with poetry – until November 2022, 100 years to the day after Howard Carter opened Tutankhamun’s tomb. Carter had told Lord Carnarvon (who was paying the bills), that he could see ‘wonderful things’. Inspired by history, I decided to finally pay proper attention to poetry.
If I look into the dark long enough, perhaps I’ll see wonderful things.
My first collection comes out this year.
My wife and family say, awesome, at last, finally, etc.