When I was a grad student, 1963-1966, I wrote more than 100 poems. Most were love poems. Many were humorous. Some fit neither category.

Fifty years later, I am joyously reading these poems. As of today, I have read and copied 62 of my poems. It’s quite interesting how much they tell about my life’s journeys at that time. It appears I was in love with love.

Now I have undertaken the project of putting all my poems into a Shutterfly book. I have discovered a fun and exciting way to do this. I created three types of files for each poem:

• The original poem, often scribbled on a piece of paper
• The poem in WORD document format
• The poem as a JPEG image, which will be directed into the Shutterfly book

One-eighth of the original poems were typed legibly. In that case, I created a PDF file of the poem, then imported that file into my OCR (optical character recognition) software. The OCR operation turned the poem into WORD-formatted form, which I copied and pasted into a WORD document. From the WORD document, I took a screenshot (Shift+Command+4 on the Mac) of the poem, and that became my JPEG.

For the other seven-eighths of the poetry collection, where the type was not clear, or where the poem was handwritten, I recorded myself reading the poem on my iPhone’s notepad, emailed it to myself, then copied and pasted it into a WORD document.

What have I discovered about my youthful self? I put the 62 poems I have read so far on a single WORD document. Using the FIND feature of the WORD program, I noted that the word “LOVE” occurs in 38 of the poems (61 percent). Here is a short alliterative poem I wrote that appears to have had good advice for the youthful me. For better or worse, I ignored this verse, and the rest is history.

LISTEN, LITTLE LOVER

Listen, little lover
Let’s leave love lay
Lest love leave little lover lonesome

Mr. Ebsen may be contacted at robertebsen@hotmail.com