My friend in Florida sent me a text message telling me to expect an early birthday gift. My birthday is in March, but her gift was delivered to me late in February. She was excited about the present because she knows that I love poetry. The gift was a book of poetry edited by Kwame Alexander called “This Is The Honey.”
When I was an adult student at Indiana University Southeast, I was enrolled in an “Introduction To Poetry” class. I was a 35-year-old student who had “retired” from a 10-year job as a small loan finance manager. While pondering the next chapter of my life, my bride suggested that I go back to school. I did that, registering at IUS as an “adult student,” which meant that I did not have to produce transcripts from the high school that had sent me into the world some 17 years prior. I did have to take some qualifying classes, but I am glad that I was able to pass my second try at Algebra with a “D.” I speak, I write, but I do not “math,” as my first two grandchildren delight in pointing out to me. But my classes about poetry ignited a desire in me to write something.
After having read and listened to the poets in my classes’ anthologies, I mistakenly believed that a poem should be dense and barely understandable, and I crafted my first poems with that idea in mind. I gave one poem the title, “I Mine Existence, Dissolve In Lore,” and wrote that “… entropy / darts in / and sucks out my eye.” My professor gently corrected me, saying that “you force on the reader (a picture) of entropy as a sucker of eyes.” I had to double-check the definition of entropy. Another poem was very topical; so much so, that I cannot recall the subject. I know that the “Oh, Ron” I wrote about in January 1982 was Ronald Reagan, but the poem does not give me a clue to which of his “moralistic, herky-jerky twists” had me pounding the keys. (There were keys, ribbons, platens, and a carriage return.) I named another poem “Edu(pollu)ca(tion),” a screed about educating ourselves about pollution. Note how I wed “education” and “pollution.” I wrote that “Jerry’s dad nay-sayed” something, but I don’t know what Jerry Brown, the governor of California did, that his father, Pat Brown, “nay-sayed.” But I got guidance and with much consultation and correction, began to craft poems that worked better for the audience outside of my head.
The Academy of American Poets launched National Poetry Month in April 1996 as an occasion “to (celebrate) poets’ integral role in our culture” and to note that “poetry matters.” A few years ago, I started to note on my social media page that April is National Poetry Month and post a poem each day. Most of the poems were written by established and published poets, but I would occasionally slip in a few of my own works. One year, my sister asked me to write a poem for her: “A tribute to (the singer) Prince.” I based the poem on Prince’s 1986 song, “Sometimes It Snows In April,” and I think I “done good.” My sister loved it, and there have been some others who have recorded favorable comments.
I love poetry and I am still absorbing my friend’s early birthday gift, reading and digesting, and sitting down to write. My editor, Ethel Winslow wrote in 2011 about her New Year’s Resolutions, and “Resolution Number 8” was to “write more poems.”
I do that.
cjon3acd@att.net