Still Getting Started
(in the "Standard" Shakespearean 14-line Sonnet style:)
ABAB CDCD EFEF GG

Professor Harold Bloom wrote How to Read and Why
which I used as a guide to writing verse.
He offered models of the best ones I
could emulate, then my own poems rehearse.
With practice over years I've gotten better.
Two decades now have passed since I began.
Experience has proven not a fetter
but made of me a more creative man.
In my immodest way, at least, I've plastered
my verse upon a website of my own.
"Self-published" does not make of me a "bastard":
(from no known parentage conceived and grown).
To Harold Bloom I trace my poems' beginnings.
He wrote not of life's losses but its winnings.