Most poets can tell you who their poetic grandparents, cousins, brothers, and sisters are – maybe not every single poet who preceded them, but those whose work or style transformed or contributed significantly to their own voice as a poet, even if it was just with one poem. April is National Poetry Month in the United States, which makes it a fine time for me to consider my own poetic ancestors.
I realize my growth story as a poet isn’t uncommon. My mom diligently and passionately read to both my older brother, David, and me when we were children. She read The Swiss Family Robinson, the Bible, Sesame Street books, her own nursing books; you name it, and she either read it to us or encouraged us to read it ourselves.
The Psalms always stuck to my ribs. The Psalmists’ passion and range of emotion, not to mention their amazing imagery, comparisons, and figurative language, ignited me. I wanted the emotional freedom I saw available within those poems.
I started seriously writing poetry when I was fifteen, after an incident with my older brother. Later in high school, as I began reading more poetry on my own, I clung to poets such as Edgar Allen Poe, Langston Hughes, Anne Sexton, and Walt Whitman. Common enough figures in most high school English classes, they were also the poets to whom I returned, for various reasons. From Poe, I learned to cultivate an ear to hear the music which sprung from within words in a way I’d never encountered before. His Gothic subject matter was an added bonus for an already-somber kid.
Hughes, Sexton, and Whitman attracted me mostly for their subject matter: each of them wrote as a sort of outcast, or outside observer, who desperately admired the beauty they saw in the tragic world and within themselves. Hughes also played jazz with his simple diction and syntax, a musical style I hadn’t heard before. Sexton sang sad songs yearning for peace, God, and reconciliation with herself. I particularly dug her Transformations – fairy tales acknowledging the terror of being a wife and mother. And Whitman – he wanted it all, and I admit, he wooed me, too, with his lusty, inviting lines that spooled along forever.
But in high school, I also read a lot about the Vietnam War. I’d been molested by two different guys at two different times in my life, and so I shared some of the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Reading poetry from Vietnam Vets in the anthologies, Unaccustomed Mercy and Winning Hearts and Minds, and other factors, enabled me to deal with my own issues and inability, and yes, initial unwillingness, to express myself vocally. I was also struggling with reconciling my religious beliefs and my desires and feelings. So poetry was for me, as it is for so many others, a much-needed outlet. But thankfully, I didn’t stay in the expunging stage of writing.
A good family friend, Dr. Sarah Bell, first read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to me in her office in Athens, Georgia. I’d graduated from high school and was planning on attending the University of Georgia. I’d passed over T.S. Eliot before, but wow, this was amazing-the sounds, the imagery, and the loneliness mixed in with sadness, wistfulness, and mystery; holy crap, how cool! I guess I got hit with Eliot at the right time, and maybe Sarah knew enough to see when the time was prime.
After Eliot, I started revising more – or rather, I had a slightly firmer grasp on the function and necessity, the power, of revision. And Sarah’s constructive criticism helped, too. I still kept at the Vietnam Veteran poets, and Sexton, Hughes, and King David. I continued writing consistently, too.
Fast forward to my last couple of undergrad years, now at the University of Southern Mississippi, studying under the guidance of Angela Ball and Dave Berry (one of the vet poets I’d idolized). Ball introduced me to James Wright and Frankie O (Frank O’Hara), while Berry encouraged his workshop students to laugh a little, to make jokey poems with serious punches. I had a lot of time to fail in my writing, to wriggle in various skins, most of them not my own. Wright taught me how to use a seemingly-simple image, and to whittle that image down through the process of the poem, to get to the heart of what I wanted to understand through images. Frankie O taught me to say it plainly, but that even saying it plainly can be complicated and fun. “It’s okay to be yourself,” he seemed to say. “If you like Cherry Coke, throw a Cherry Coke in there.”
At USM, in my own research, I also began focusing on contemporary haiku and senryu written in English. I admired the work of Gary Hotham, Stanford Forrester, and ai li, but I also looked back at older masters including Bashō and Issa, and the contemporary Yamaguchi Seishi. Haiku and senryu taught me the value of concision, of dynamite created when you pack words tightly.
Then, I moved away to the Ph.D. program at Texas Tech. I’d somehow gotten into this place poetically where I felt like I had to be smart because I had studied contemporary graduate school poems, and I included little of myself but my brain in the poems. One of my fellow poets, Aaron Rudolph, suggested that I put more of myself into my work, that I take those emotional risks which effective poems take.
So I did. My poems grew surprisingly more tasty, and less like sawdust. As an added bonus, an anthology of prose poetry, No Boundaries, fell into my lap. After researching the genre, I kept returning to Charles Baudelaire, Russell Edson, and Mary Koncel. I laughed at how Baudelaire’s flaneur treated people like crap and then, in the very next sentence, talked about how a beautiful cloud shone. The contrasting tones tripped me out. Meanwhile, Edson and Koncel challenged me to work in a magical realism with emotional significance, spiritual possibility, and interesting props.
Since Tech, I’ve incorporated prose poetry into my set of skills and have moved on. I’ve written, over the last five years, a book of poetic responses to others’ poems, in both verse and prose poetry.
I can’t say where I’m going poetically, and I’m not worried about it at all. I like where I am, but I don’t plan on staying here. Yet what does this mean for you? What do I want you to get out of my story?
I hope it inspires you to consider your own story, to think critically about how those who have worked in your own discipline before you have affected you, and what you’ve really learned from them. I hope to pass along these poets’ lives and works in the spirit of giving, with the chance that they might contribute to your own life and work. Finally, I hope this lights a flame of desire within you to create, to make the next poem, next song, next quilt, which future artists can warm their hearts and hands by.
