As the year 2011 was slouching toward its death, my editor composed some resolutions for 2012. She kept it simple and manageable — there were 12 for ’12 — but they were reflective, generous, humorous and possible, a sort of emotional tai chi. I’ll not recount her resolutions in their entirety, but I will speak to “Resolution #8: Write more poems.”
When I grew weary of the set of my life, I shattered it, examined the pieces and rearranged them: I quit a 10-year job and went back to school, to college at Indiana University Southeast. My previous educational outing had ended about twelve years earlier, when I left the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (which was at the time a two-year school that awarded certificates). But I had always had a desire to learn more about everything (but math) and to be exposed to the kind of academic environment I saw while working as a teenaged page in the closed stacks of the University of Pittsburgh library. So I drooled as I paged through the catalogue and then, selected all the courses that the English department offered. And found poetry.
I’m sure that there was poetry offered to me in grade school and high school, but I don’t remember what it was, except in songs. In April 2011, I wrote about having had poetry in my life before I found poetry in the college classroom. “I knew the song ‘Trees,’ … long before I ever knew it had been written by the poet, Joyce Kilmer.” I learned to sing, “How would you like to go up in a swing?” and did not know (until I sat down to write this) that it was a poem written by Robert Louis Stevenson. I heard the song “I’m growing old” and sang it for years, and when I looked for the artist I believed had recorded it, I found that it was from the poem written by John Godfrey Saxe.
But at IUS, Drs. Richard Brengle and Millard Dunn introduced me to poets old and new, bade me write my own and showed me that it was possible to interpret what a poet has written. Dr. Brengle read aloud in class a poem I had written, and gave an analysis so accurate it was as if he had sat in my head and handed the words to my hands. And when Dr. Dunn, a poet himself, introduced me to another poet at a party, the man told me to identify myself: I am a poet. On the social networking site I frequent, I gave this “about” to describe me: “Parent, Cool Papa, artist, writer, poet, singer, pool-player.” Those seven things provide me with rich poetic material.
On the perils of parenting, Galway Kinnell (b. 1927) wrote “After Making Love, We Hear Footsteps.” Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) wrote “In My Craft Or Sullen Art” about the agonies and ecstasies of a poet’s obsession. And Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917) wrote of seven pool players at the Golden Shovel in “We Real Cool.”
My editor’s “Resolution Number 8” works as well for me, provided that I recognize the poetry in “The Red Wheelbarrow” (William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963), and “Underwear” (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, b. 1919); to be unafraid to write a poem “To A Louse” or “To A Mouse” (Robert Burns, 1759-1796), or about the “Bond” between two trees, as Robert Morgan (b. 1944) did.
I have a life that sings with poetry and I need only arrange the words formed by my passage through it.