I was one of those nerd kids who, by the seventh grade, had been differentiated from my classmates as not like them. They were absolutely correct: We didn't hold a molecule in common.
I already knew at that point that it was all Adam and Steve for me--as if messing with my sister's prom dress hadn't already clued me in. Yet I was willing to play along for the sake of peace that I shared whatever interests they had--but then Mr. Funnell happened.
As this was the 70's, Mr. F was not an English teacher but a Language Arts Instructor-- and I'll be clear upfront that this is not a sex story. I was, yes, a boiling bag of almost teen hormones, true, but Mr. F reminded me less of Burt Reynolds in Cosmo and more of the Keebler Elf. Anyway, in the course of this eventful year, one of our assignments changed me, and this in an unexpected way.
We were to write a haiku, and given the schematics, were to bring one to class the next day. That night at home I filled a couple of notebook pages and turned them in the next day.
Teachers often act as if they were never the age of those they teach, that they never notice that one wildebeest on their savannah is not treated equally by its fellow beasts. So of course Mr. F singled me out and read some of my haikus during class. Of course my classmates hated me. I was, again, a pet. I was, confirmed, a fag. I could have died.
But the truth was that the assignment had opened up something that had been struggling to open for sometime. I had started to "hear" poems in my head-- which is still my favorite method of writing. I hear a certain melody made in a combination of words, even morphemes, I hear spoken in my voice a beautiful, flowing melody where such sound is so embedded that it is part of the meaning, a theme without which the sex, love or death being written of lacks substance or dignity.
Although I had never tried to explain to anyone what I was hearing, it was clear that other people were not hearing quite the same things. I was vibrating on a personal parabola and in Northeast Indiana, in the 1970s, that sort of flagrant individuality was the marker of not just a bad penny, but a tainted one.
I survived obviously. In fact I still date being a poet to that assignment, place and time that all of these threads came together for me with all the force majeure of a Byzantine icon. I still hear the music occasionally, I still write and I definitely read poetry. "the blood jet is poetry," said Sylvia Plath, " there is no stopping it." I've always been proud to believe that.
From the point of waking up after surgery though through just a few days ago, I wondered if that music had withered, if I had aged past it somehow. As if I were in a sports car and didn't recognize an old friend grown into homelessness as he stumbled along a busy streets-cape.
But it appeared again. Recently, with force and need, just as I remembered it. It returned the moment I gave myself permission to live, if I cared to try. Poetry, I've learned, isn't just about death and loss. In fact, it is a bald faced celebrant at the bacchanal of life. If one can't or won't engage at least a grudging respect for such a basic product of joy, the universal orchestra has no choice but to decouple its calendar from such as that.
The poems I've written eat heavily of a year of silence, and any poet will tell you that such fecundity as I have momentarily is a blessing and a curse. On one hand, my chosen art is new to me again. On the other, it is new again. Lessons learned from several decades don't always apply, or they require, as a medical doctor, Continuing Education Units. It's not so bad as learning to walk or biking can be in mid-life, but it can be frustrating to find oneself captivated by tripe.
Deft handling of theme and the ordering and agreement/tone of the chosen words are impossible to produce, let alone write, without recognition of what drives them toward greatness--the simple act of turning the subject and circumstances of that subject's life, into Art. Cancer did not, does not, feel artistic. For me its velocity took all of my attentive resources and called to mind a question both of necessity and its applicability. Many great metaphors have been and will be applied to describe the experience of cancer. But they are best constructed with the illness in the rear view mirror.
My poems lately are affirmation that I do want to live, and their timing suggests that in addition to wanting it, I've learned to desire it at the detriment of my old pal Cancer Wildcell. Now I cannot and would not tell you these are done well. I don't tread on subjectivity by insisting it replace an objective judgment for one that thoroughly has an agenda.
They are though, some of them, both good and interesting.
I will post some of them here if they receive outside publication, or if I feel that they would advance the story for us. Just know that they exist again, under the best circumstances of being wanted.
As today is Friday I'm in chemo, Erbitux dripping into me as I type. It is beautiful here today, just before the cusp of Memorial Day, and pink roses are flirting with the edge of the driveway as evidence of that. There is evidence, too, that the song is gaining lungs as I work. Surprised but delighted to be 12 again.
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