I intentionally chose the term author and not poet in the headline as I am not a poet. Definitely not. Then how come I wrote poems? Well, it was just an idea that came about once upon a day during one of my meditative early morning joggings. Why not write an English poem every day for one year running? Why in English? My mother tongue is German. I just wanted it. There occurred lines of Keats and Blake and Donne and Vaughn and Wordsworth and … during running or nordic walking. Ages ago I went to university to study English literature and poetry. That’s certainly the reason why in English and this is also why there are various allusions to brilliant lines of real English poets.

My intention of writing a poem every day, however,  turned out to be unfeasible as I could not live through a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings every day. Nonetheless, after a year, there were just one hundred of them. Some of them are rather simple, others are more or less complicated but not as hard as the metaphysical ones. There are some I like more than others but which I will not tell.

No, I am not a poet. I was a teacher for a few decades and an etcher putting drawings into etchings and using water-colours on them (see twelve masks) or putting layers of aquatint in multi-level process on the copper plates I worked on (see: Metamorphosis of a Man into a Tree). And I am an actor. For the time being I am more of an actor than anything else. I made etchings for some twenty years and then suddenly stopped. A stop that came out of the blue. I wrote poems only for one year, then stopped and that is why I am not a poet. Or perhaps I was one but no longer than just for one year.   

 Rudolf Kelchner