true north

A couple days ago, J and I were talking about Dead Poet's Society, which, to many people's surprise is not a movie I am enamored with (in a similar vein, I prefer Mona Lisa Smiles so much more.)  Once it was on video, I  remember our sophomore year teacher rolling in the VCR TV on its cart and having us watch it, though I'm pretty sure I had already been writing poetry (or maybe quotes should be around the "poetry" part ) for a year. Since the end of freshman year when we were charged with writing them. I don't remember what models were give us. Whitman? Dickinson? Frost?  Either way I wrote a bunch--about flamingos, kittens, unrequited high school love. I wrote them out on notebook pages, on pen pal stationery, in the blue lockable diary a cousin gave me for my 14th birthday. They may have rhymed, but it got much worse later on in college. Beyond some Poe in Junior high, I wasn't that familiar with poetry in general, so its no wonder I was clueless those first couple years. But I was also writing lots of other things--papers on UFO's, essays on the 1st Amendment that won prizes, flawless 5 paragraph essays, a term paper on Shakespeare's women, newspaper editorials on environmental issues. And I was reading--still lots of horror and some romance. I still have those early poems, what I'm guessing was most of them in a folder somewhere, though I threw a lot of things away a while back, mostly things that already exist in book form. But I kept all those early fledgling drafts, mostly for my own amusement. 

I thought for sure everyone wanted to be a poet when we started writing then at 14, and yet I didn;t even know any writers, let alone poets. It seemed like something you once could have been. Like a mapmaker or a pirate, but not something anyone did as a job.  A friend of mine had submitted one of her early poems successfully to that National library of Poetry racket and I was a little jealous at the thought of publication,. My senior year, I joined a campus poetry club, but missed most meetings due to rehearsal. All I remember from the ones I did was a group sitting around reading poems to each other, but i was not yet brave enough to share any of the work I'd been writing. Looking back, perhaps the hooks of poetry were already in me. While I wasn't ready to climb on my desk "O' Captain, My Captain" style, perhaps I was already a poet. When I was a kid, I liked sad and deep chasms of emotion, a delicious love of sadness that was both unbearable and desirable at the same time. And I was already in love with words, and paper, and notebooks.  The scrawl of lines across a paper before I even knew how to form letters.

So when I say I chose to be a poet when I was in my mid-20s, perhaps it was not a choice at all. While I had decided, after my failed and temporary insanity of being a marine biologist, to study English Lit, to immerse myself in theater work, the poems were still there intermittently. In winter of 1993, I typed slender poems on onionskin thin typewriter paper. One year, I took a poetry workshop (I had taken intro to Fiction writing my second semester, but was Lit track, not writing, so the workshops were electives.) I was enamored of Dickinson, so a lot of it rhymed, and my teacher probably hated me, but weirdly my classmates loved those poems, mostly because we all kind of sucked.

But I got a little better and shed the rhyme the summer afterward, the next period of time I remember really spending hours devoted to writing and poetry things. Entire afternoons at the dining room table until I had to head to rehearsals for a student show I was stage managing. This was when I started making recordings to hear the poems aloud on my little boombox. When I wrote poems that would get me honorable mentions in college poetry prizes the next  spring. When I sent things to journals that rejected me and vanity anthologies  that, of course, published them. 

Of course, it was another couple years until I got much better. Until I informally made that sort of commitment to being a poet, and even then I only can identify it fully now in hindsight.  After some mental health struggles in early 1998, and really just a malaise in general about the future, during a time when I was realizing my plans to teach Literature weren't really something I was suited for, I started writing that fall. A lot. By spring, I had that first terrible manuscript and a plan to keep writing no matter what I did to make a living. Within a year I would get my first journal acceptance after many rejections in what was still the era of postal snail mail subs and anxious mailbox visits. While I worked at the library, things began to take a little more shape. My first chapbook was accepted. I got my first taste of community via listservs and online journals. Later, the first readings and recognitions and MFA enrollment. My first DIY publishing ventures and book acceptances.

It's been a long time since, and so many poems and projects and intervening years. So many obsessions and restarts and evolving ways of thinking about publishing and community. There have been times when I've wanted to write everything but poetry. Times when I didn't want to write anything but. But those freshman year poems were the roots and beginnings of all of it. Its funny to think about how things you were doing as a clueless and moody teen, whose main concerns were the typical stuff of adolescence (boys, clothes, hair, etc.) that substantial thing took root and would grow.  

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