Posting
that old poem, it occurred to me that I haven’t any new ones. I started writing
poetry in high school, as most teens with a literary bent and a lot of excess
angst do. I wrote them through college and into my early thirties. The 1980s, when
I couldn’t seem to get a novel going, spawned a lot of poetry – some of it
meant to be song lyrics. Then, somewhere in the late 1980s, the poetry urge
completely dried up. I have no idea why.
Of
the several notebooks filled with poems, I have forty-six I’m not ashamed of. I
think I’ll post them one by one on this blog, as poetry doesn’t sell. Only one
has ever been published, in an anthology called Light Year back in the 1980s,
and I didn’t get paid for it. Had to buy the book. Oh, well, at the time it was
worth it to me.
So
what makes a person a poet, as opposed to a prose writer? A lot of people are
both, but I’ve always been rather single-minded as far as the creative impulse.
I’ve noticed that when I’m writing a lot, I stop knitting, and when I’m
knitting a lot, I seem to nearly stop writing. I have never figured out what it
was about that particular decade that inspired the type of writing I did then.
It was a hard decade. I was working at a well-paying job that I absolutely
hated. My father died in 1983, which plunged my dysthymic self deep into the
dark flood. In 1984 I got laid off from that job (thank God), and never have
earned that much money again, though the stress wasn’t worth it. When you burst
into tears every time the alarm goes off and it takes you five minutes to
unclench your jaws in the morning, you need a different job, no matter how good
the money is. To illustrate the sort of people I worked with, here’s the primo
example. My father wasted away from cancer in the first half of 1983, dying the
Thursday after Father’s Day. I had been telling people at work who asked how he
was that he wasn’t going to recover. When he died I called in to tell them I
wouldn’t be in for a week. The person who answered the phone, who I had
considered a friend, said, “Oh, he really died? We thought you were just saying
that.”
I
wrote the poem February Midnight at a midnight in February, into a small tape
recorder I kept by the bed then. In the morning when I transcribed it, I didn’t
change a single word. I still think it’s my best poem. The little tape recorder
helped with a lot of inspiration, because by the time I found the light, a
pencil, and my glasses, I lost the thought, even when all that was on the
nightstand. Just picking up the recorder in the dark and hitting the On button
was a lot faster. I’ll post that poem tomorrow.
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