Thomas Scott• Show poetry

Been writing poetry since my early teens except for a 30-year sabbatical to make advertising.
My first published poem appeared in The Canadian Forum when that journal meant something to Canadian poets and I was in high school.
The piece was about my Latin teacher.
She was beautiful and for 35 minutes each day she taught me naked.
Watching her stroll back and forth, turn and reach, bend and stretch was very pleasing but so distracting I was failing the subject.
My English teacher used the success of the poem to embarrass her into giving me a passing Latin grade in exchange for which I agreed to leave school permanently.
After discovering the manipulative power of creative writing I was happy to drop out and get a job writing advertising copy. This paid much better than going to high school or making poems.
In 2006, GREF, a publishing arm of York University’s Glendon College published my first volume, User’s Guide To A Blank Wall, a collection of poems with French translations by Daniel Soha. My second collection, How Things Got Like This, is scheduled for launch this year. GREF is publishing and my friend Daniel Soha is doing the French translations again.
Several quotes from well known writers are in my mind all the time. I think about Molly Peacock calling poems, “ … little miracles of understanding,” and Coleridge's declaration that poetry is “ … exactly the right words in exactly the right order.” I take license from a quote from D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence says, “Never trust the teller; trust the tale.”
I love reading poetry and I’m no snob. If an imperfect poem has a line that blows me away, some original imagery or if it exposes a rare truth, I’ll get very excited. I don’t demand perfection. I am aware that some people read poetry the way Jerry Seinfeld dated women, seeking the flaws and then obsessing on them. Not me. It probably shows in my work.