Besides being a blogger, I
happen to be a poet.
In January, I graduated
from the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in writing. After two
intensive years of reading and writing poetry, I suddenly found myself able to
read whatever I wanted, from the trashy to the sublime. I immediately
embarked on four months of reading novels and nonfiction. I read a lot of
great books like Wild by Cheryl Strayed, Unbroken by
Laura Hillenbrand, and Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, and a lot of
above-average-quite-good-not-at-all-sorry-I-read-'em books like Are You My
Mother by Alison Bechdel and The Language of Flowers by Vanessa
Diffenbaugh.
But I didn't pick up one
single volume of poetry in my four-month post-graduation extravaganza of
reading. And guess what? I didn't write much poetry either, or at least not
much decent poetry. I even took the April poem-a-day challenge but my
poems were decidedly uninspired.
And of course my pea brain
wanted to write good or even great poetry and said pea brain knew it was
missing something but it couldn't quite settle on what that something might be.
Chocolate? Sunshine? Puppies? Oh, (palm hitting forehead) poetry!!
Now I'm easing my way back
in--I just finished reading my contributor's copy (see how I slipped that in?)
of The Cancer Poetry Project 2, an anthology that features poems by
cancer patients and the people who love them. Next up is Reverse
Rapture by Dara Weir, a book with more parentheses than are found in entire
libraries. Then I'll turn to my shelves of unread poetry books and choose
whatever calls to me, whether its David Trinidad or Tess Gallagher, Thomas Lux
or Rita Dove, Jack Gilbert or Eduardo C. Corral.
I can't help but wonder if
there's a metaphor embedded here; that what we take in is also what we put out;
that we, as an American people, are taking in way too much of the wrong
stuff—crap TV, fear, anger, corruption. The paradox is that we need to put more
goodness out into the world—more friendship, considered thought, hard work for
justice—in order to then get it back,
but that does seem to be the state of things, doesn't it? Slap me before
I start singing Kumbaya.
And now, to Dara Weir.
