The short-ish third person version…
Todd Regoulinsky is a graphic designer, musician, husband, and father who has been writing poetry for over 30 years. In 2008, he published his first collection of poetry entitled Odd Bits Of Broken Things – primarily an autobiographical series of work that covered roughly a two year period of his life. In 2023, he published his second book called Okay Okay Okay – a collection of poems that were inspired by people’s last words. His poems have been published in Aegis, freefall, Guerilla Poetry, and most recently, Barzakh Magazine.
The longer first person version…
I’ve been writing poetry for the last three decades mostly as a way to pass the time, organize the thoughts in my head, scream into the void, open my heart to a new love, mourn the loss of an old love, and generally make sense of the world around me.
To sum up, I’ve been writing poetry in self defense.
It all started in high school, jotting down some of the most horrific forced-rhyme poetry this side of a Vogon in spiral notebooks. Since my exposure to poetry had been limited to the few sonnets and strange clumps of words that found their way into my English textbooks, I didn’t have much of an idea what I was doing. No comprehension of what poetry really was, what it could do. It was mostly bleeding onto the page.
Some of that changed when I got to college and discovered that not only did poetry not have to rhyme, but that there was a lot more to read than what was in my textbooks. I also took a poetry workshop class and loved it so much that I lobbied my professor to take the class a second time (a request that apparently no one else had ever made). Still lots of bleeding onto pages, but now there were gutters to carry the flow in specific directions.
What was really mind blowing was when my cousin compared some of my poems to Charles Bukowski – a name that meant nothing to me at the time because I’d never heard of the guy. I picked up a copy of Love Is A Dog From Hell and read it cover to cover in a day or two, my brain slowly oozing out of my ears. Suddenly, I felt pretty good about bleeding all over the page and figured maybe I was heading in the right direction.
From there, it was only a matter of a couple of crash-and-burn love affairs, getting married, having a kid, and coming to understand all the things I didn’t know before getting a real writing practice going. Everyone has their own process, but I can’t necessarily recommend mine to anyone in good conscience.
“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.” – Hunter S. Thompson
Yeah, you tell ’em doc… Anyways, I began writing Okay Okay Okay as an exercise to find something to write about that was outside of my own head and experience. Through the process, I found that such a separation for me isn’t completely possible and came to embrace the bits and pieces of me that seeped into my poems.
So there it is. The continuing story of me.
Thanks for tagging along!