Prose Night at the Writing Life, 14 April 2024
About trying to adjust to writing poetry after years of writing prose.
I wrote my first poem I actually meant to try and say something with more than a decade ago, but it’s only been recently I’ve tried to take producing and creating poetry seriously. This is after spending most of my life as a writer of fiction and nonfiction prose, like the kind you’re reading today.
When it comes to writing in general, I sort of have things figured out. You never completely master the craft of writing, of course, but you do tend to learn a few things. I thought I had, anyway.
Today, I decided to look back on my history with poetry (or my lack of it), what finally drew me to the art form, and where I need to go from here1. I’ve come to the conclusion I have plenty to learn about how to be a poet, so I’ll be keeping quite busy with this work in the months and years to come.
My first experience or exposure to poetry was, I suppose, Dr. Seuss’ books. Those stories were told in verse, even though they were not advertised as such. I was always a fan of clever rhyme schemes, whether I heard them in a book or in a song on the radio, but it was not something I ever aspired to do. For me as a kid, it always felt limiting to have to have rely on using words that would end with a certain syllable and/or sound rather than just choosing whatever words seemed to fit the situation. It was also a frustration trying to write poetry as a kid, because it always seemed like it would take twice as long to produce a collection of words (a poem), when I could produce much more in a shorter period of time if I was just writing prose. It seemed more natural to me. And as far as academic assignments in elementary and high school, very few of these (of which I was thankful back then).
I’d hold to this viewpoint for years to come, honestly.
After college and perhaps after a few English department assignments when I had some exposure to classical Shakespearean verse, poetry and me pretty much traveled on two separate paths. My career took me into first journalism and then teaching. Oddly enough, there was not much call for poetic skills in the former profession. As for teaching, earlier in my career, when I was serving as primarily a language arts teacher, I dabbled in introducing some of my middle school students to basic poetry forms and techniques. Since I moved toward special education work, I’ve not done any poetry lessons for a long time2.
Even though I just said my teaching didn’t have a role in getting me fully into poetry, it actually did play a very small role in the beginning. I’ll have to explain the story, as well as what truly sparked a full-blown interest in poetry - a good portion of it wound up being a product of the people I begun to hang out with on a monthly basis.
Teaching
The time was my third year of teaching. I was still at the first district I began teaching at, entering my third year. As it turned out, I learned I would be leaving the school at the end of the year due to budget cuts. It was something of a traumatic situation, since it had been the first school I’d ever taught in. I was preparing to leave the massive classroom I’d occupied at the top of one of those old early 20th century three-floor schools, which had formerly been a library and still had the long fluorescent lights from those days. Even such a cavern of a room seemed small to contain the antic seventh and eighth grade kids, sometimes two dozen at a time, that rebounded from one spot to another. It was about late April and I decided to kill off the rest of the year for my language arts classes by starting a poetry unit, blissfully aware April was National Poetry Month for a couple more decades. I was also starting to wonder how I’d let my students know I was leaving by the end of the year, because I had no idea how to approach it3.
As with any classroom assignment, a few of my kids got into the idea of creating poetry, while others couldn’t be bothered with it (or, in some cases, any assignments). I tried to work through it with them, and the students and I managed to muddle through it with minimal damage and perhaps some enlightenment.
Somewhere along the end of the unit, I decided to have the kids choose one poem to recite before the class. I think I used a performance rubric, or scoring tool, for the presentations, or I might have just given them extra credit for having the guts to get up in front of their 12 to 13-year-old peers and reveal something of themselves.
There were a few principles I had developed at the beginning of my career as a teacher I stuck with through the years. One of those was a promise I always made to my students:
I’m never going to give you an assignment I’m not willing to do myself. - Liegois
In this spirit, I decided I was going to write a poem and perform it in front of the class just like the others. As I sat down to concentrate on what I was going to say, my imminent departure from the school came to mind4. This was what I ended up producing.
Waiting (AKA Alone at the Crossroads)
Alone at the crossroads, waiting for my ride.
No point in staying any longer, I’ve got another place I have to go.
The road is empty.
I know the schedule, I know when the ride’s here, but it’s not here yet.
I’m still waiting.
All my packing is done – my bags are packed, debts paid, ticket paid – I’ve bought my ticket – but no ride.
I’m waiting alone at the crossroads.
It’s an Iowa crossroads, strictly Iowa thru and thru – the two lane, intersection, a stop sign, tall corn stretching, their stalks and nothing else on the horizon except for a farmhouse or two.
No other people, obviously.
Now I know why the old-time farm wives went a little nuts.
Still waiting.
Alone, not one else, I grab a battered old pulp paperback out of my bag, and picture I’m on Mars, Coursurant, Dune, anywhere but here, waiting.
All the work seems to be done.
I know kind of where I will go, and what I will do.
I know for sure that I have to go, there’s no choice but to go, even, deep down, I want to go – but I’m not.
I’m sitting here, waiting for my ride.
That’s the thing I hate, it’s the waiting. . .
Before the ride.
Would I consider this to be a master stroke of American letters? Maybe not exactly. But it was the first time I decided to put some thought and emotion into something resembling verse. It was a first dip into the unfamiliar waters of poetry where I tried to express something of myself and my feelings. And it wasn’t a poor experience by any means.
Peer Pressure (The Positive Kind)
The second influence on whether I considered myself a poet or not came from a much more mundane source than me trying to bear my soul to the world.
At about the same time I began my teaching career, I moved back to my hometown of Muscatine. This was about the time I decided to try and revive my interest in writing and fiction. I decided to get together with a group of writers in my hometown I had dabbled with before, which was the Writers on the Avenue.
At the time, I was one of the youngest members of the group (if I was still active with them, I still might be), and was a genre fiction writer in a group including essayists, humorists… and a considerable number of poets. Some wrote verse about their faith, their families, their own lives, or the land around them. And they were having a lot of fun sharing their work. So, eventually I decided to join in on the fun and start writing poetry myself.
Some of that poetry covered political and personal philosophies, cultural observations and the like. Over time, I became fascinated with the Mississippi River, which has been more or less a constant in my life, and life on the river, and several poems touched on these themes. You’ve seen me share some of those early poems on this page, as well as some later efforts.
I loved the challenge of relying on just a few well-chosen words to invoke images or feelings it would take me whole paragraphs to lay out in my fiction or nonfiction. I loved the experience of experimenting with a new genre without necessarily the pressure I put on myself writing fiction.
I used to say (well, I still do, but I used to say, as well5) that if someone was producing written material, published or otherwise, they had the right to call themselves writers. By this definition, I guess I ended up being a poet somewhere along the way.
Where This is Going
I’d rate my current progress developing my poetry craft to be maybe where I was about a decade ago with my fiction writing. By this, I mean I was serious about both practicing and developing my writing, but I hadn’t crossed into the level of officially publishing it (whether independently or through a publishing company). I’ve gotten there with my fiction, but I acknowledge there is a long way to go on that journey and there is more to learn about the process than I’ll ever be able to learn in a lifetime.
Where it comes to my poetry, I’m starting the development and growth process in earnest. I’ve just recently joined a local group, the Society of Great River Poets in nearby Burlington, and I look forward to attending their meetings going forward, when I’m not starting to attend book fairs during the coming weekends. I’ve already been advised by my new fellow poets to try and omit needless words in my work, a habit of my prose writing. I’ve now officially joined the Iowa Poetry Association, as well, and hope to take advantage of some of the resources such a group could make available. And I need to look at some of the resources some of my poets have already given me regarding chapbook publishing and other items.
It’s going to be another extended process, for sure. However, I’m looking forward to the challenge and the words I’ll craft along the way.
I almost decided to turn this into one of my A Writer’s Biography pieces, one of several essays I’ve written over the past few years detailing my growth and experiences as a writer during my lifetime that seem to have become it’s own project. It still might become a chapter in the project, but I’ll think about it later.
As it turns out, poetry is not specifically mentioned as part of the Iowa Core Standards, although there are some standards in reading of literature and writing which could apply to the practice of poetry. However, since poetry as such is not specifically an academic requirement, I wonder how many teachers in Iowa even attempt to do something in this area.
In the fall of 2024, I will begin teaching at the sixth school district of my educational career. Budget cuts and moves can add up after a while. I got used to handling goodbyes eventually.
This is where the vagaries of memory have started to affect me. I distinctly remember writing this poem as a response to my departure, a subtle way of letting them know I was leaving. But I also remember a speech at the end of the last year, part of a speech unit for the class, where I explicitly told them of my departure from the school. Or maybe I did both. Memories after a decade can be a tricky thing.
Blatant Mitch Hedberg reference.