We are all creative beings. Our artful passions can be expressed in numerous ways like singing, dancing, or writing poetry.  These talents are not bound by age, race, culture or land borders. Innocent to the world, we are born with our creative energy. Creativity is then cultivated by good or bad, external or internal conditions, and grows eventually into a remarkable you.

So how did I develop my creativity?

I witnessed my own creative self emerge and fade before it returned to me.  As a child in Kingston, Jamaica, I shook my little body to the funk jazz song “Soul Makossa” by Cameroon Saxophonist Manu Dibango. My appreciation for dance and all genres of music grew out of that moment.  After my cousin Wayne taught me how to draw, I spent hours sitting on my father’s balcony trying to master drawing cartoon characters from the local newspapers.

As a teenager in New York, my love of art would take me into various museums across the city. I walked through the picturesque streets and took photos of everything from the subway to the soaring Twin Towers.  As my life’s energies shifted to marriage and parenthood, my creative energies became dormant.

Then one day something compelled me to write the words “collective souls arched over to see the layout of the future”. For a while, those words were safely tucked inside my wallet, written on a tiny ripped sheet of paper. Years later, I sat in a creative writing class reading
the poem, “Love After Love” written by Derek Walcott. This poem awakened me. In the moment, I added more words to the ones written on that tiny piece of paper to complete my first titled poem, “ Us Them We ”.  Shortly after, I met and began to exchange poetry with Matt Bruce, Friend, Poet, and major writing contributor to this site.  We began to exchange our work.  In these valuable exchanges, I realized that poetry is holistic, imaginative and spiritual. The creative juices were back!

My affinity for poetry has grown exponentially since that first poem in 2005. Yet, I have so much more to read, learn, write and share.  This position is that of the Neophyte–the beginner or novice.   If you are a creative soul, emerging possibly out of many art disciplines, who embodies and embraces the art form of poetry, then you are a
NeophytePoet.  I am a NeophytePoet. Poetry inspire and motivate us in such a way it develops our emotional intelligence and foster our creative consciousness.

Through poetry, we hear and are able to see our shared experiences–our shared humanity.  neophytePoets.net is a platform developed for the poet to set their poems free—free to be experienced by the world.

I invite everyone, including ALL writers, poets, spoken word performers, of all levels of writing, to embrace this site as the place to read, watch, and listen to poetry. I encourage neophytePoets to become in tune with their poetry gift, write stories in their own unique
way and presented them in the form of poetry footprints on this website. neophytePoets.net is our corner of the web where we learn to spread our wings, bare our souls and find that the world is ripe with the heart of a poet. This website is where we meet. Thank you for checking us out!  Please be sure to visit us often.

D-
Founder and NeophytePoet