My life as a poet

When I was nine, shortly after my little brother was born, I started writing rhyming verse. It was very bad, as one might expect. My parents, both of them English teachers, let me know that it was very bad. I was crushed. It is hard to be up against all of English literature at an early age. There are many teachers of writing and English who believe that harsh criticism is appropriate for anyone who imagines they want to write, basically to keep the riff-raff out.

But people who unkindly discourage a child's doggerel, honestly, shouldn't their license to parent be revoked? Ah yes, we don't actually require any certifications of aptitude for prospective parents, do we. In postindustrial society parenting is one of the last folk arts! unqualified, uncertified, unprofessional! Unlike poetry.

(As I write this, desparate parents are abandoning their children to the State of Nebraska, which has promised to take care of them, while the lawmakers hurry to revise the loophole in the law that meant only to take in infants from those unable or unprepared for parenthood.)

My career as a playwright began even earlier and has come to even less, to this point at any rate. But I digress.

At fourteen I discovered the rhyming dictionary section at the back of my Webster's dictionary. We were living on Center Street in Whitewater, during one of those periods of months when my brother Chris lived with us and went to school with me. I perused the rhyme schemes and picked a lengthy entry full of likely words to construct a rhymed, rhythmic, free verse, with a great many short lines. Chris informed me it was pretty bad. I thought a lot of his opinion, which seemed far more refined than my own, and was discouraged.

After that I confined my involvement with poetry to reading. We had a poetry section in the Introduction to Literature that was one of my ninth grade English classes (an introduction, as though we'd never met). I read more of the text than the assignments, as was my custom. That was how I discovered e. e. cummings. The journal I had started, during boring stretches of classtime and other odd moments, lost not only punctuation and capitalization but even paragraphing.

My mother had heaps of fat poetry textbooks in her office at the university, that had been given to her by textbook publishers' representatives, in hopes that she would order them for her classes, with titles like Poetry and Introduction to Poetry and even Live Poetry. So I took them and read them right through. More or less. Anything that didn't lose my attention after the first few lines, I continued reading. So eventually I read very widely among the briefer, more frequently anthologized poets.

While we were in San Diego, my mother had heaps of feminist periodicals in her office. These were publishing quite a lot of poetry at that time, as there was something of a poetry boom in the women's movement, of both confessional and political bent. As I leafed through the newsprint pages, I found some that I quite liked. There's poetry in all our hearts, though we've been taught otherwise. I began typing out copies of them for myself, as writing out copies by hand or typer was at the time the only way to make single copies. I acquired an old Underwood manual typewriter for this purpose, that had something wrong with the shift key so that the capital letters were slightly dropped. It was some time before I began using paper that wasn't scrap, discarded ditto sheets.

The next year when I went to college, I took the poetry textbooks with me. I marked my favorites with oak leaves, pressed between the pages of these tomes -- some are still there. The stacks of Memorial Library were open, and I found more of e. e. cummings in my wanderings. I had a better typewriter, and copied out some of my selections over again on clean paper, and had by this time started numbering the sheets. I continued collecting poetry, from songwriters and miscellaneous sources, anything that struck my fancy, for more than a hundred pages.

Poetry was not something that I could do, though. Not merely me. The way art classes had convinced me that I was hopelessly uncreative, my schooling had managed to inoculate me against the possibility of writing something of the kind myself. However talented I might have thought myself as a child, I was unanointed by any recognition. By the time I got out of college in fact I wasn't even reading anymore -- not even the textbooks.

For better or worse, that wore off. I got a job in civil service, and then several other kinds of jobs, and moved several times, and began to think again that I could write, although what I might write was always a question. I had no contacts of any kind with the publishing world -- except my mother, who had published several scholarly books. Like I say, no actual contacts. Another decade went by. I married, and had a child. And then I found fandom, where people read books, and fanwriting, or it found me: drafted me, picked my name literally out of a hat, and honored me.

When I wrote my Guest of Honor speech for that convention I was at the same time up to my nose in public readings and writing activities with The Writers Place, which was a sort of local arts nonprofit that sponsored classes and had an office, classroom, reading space. I had taken a class there in writing fiction -- what is called mainstream fiction, not genre fiction -- and our class continued to meet as a writing group afterwards for many months. I was writing Raymond Carver type stories, grim realism, which was the dominant style of the dwindling mainstream of the time. One of the people in the class (a colleague of my dad's at the English Department in Whitewater actually) one evening after our meeting took me for a good time to a bar, for an open-mike poetry reading, which was a new thing.

We paused in the entry, at the door. Lights twinkled in the dark like Christmas. Someone was reading aloud inside, and as though it were a concert, we didn't want to interrupt them with our entrance. That was early days with the Cheap At Any Price Poets, where not-very-harsh criticism was given with tongue in cheek: poems scored on a ten-point scale like Olympic skating, by randomly chosen judges. We stepped in as the crowd was applauding.