I was reading through some existing projects--basically everything I've written in the past year--mostly a handful of smaller series, some of which will eventually no doubt come together to form full-length collection #9, another couple that might very well be the beginnings of #10. I finally feel like the past year, or maybe even the past 6 months, has been very productive in the actually getting things down on paper in a way that I probably haven't been since my MFA days, maybe not even then. As we roll toward fall, I realized that it's been 20 years since I first really began feeling like I wanted to take a serious go at this poem thing. I had been sending out work before that, from about age 19, with my little electric typewriter and my whiteout and my
Writer's Digest magazine. But through college, I was in and out, focused on various things--for a bit it was trying (badly) to write fiction, for awhile it was theatre, for awhile it was teaching English or drama.
But the fall of 1998, was the first time I felt like poetry/writing could be something of a career (well maybe not a career as in money, but a career as in life pursuit.) I was just entering my second year of MA-English studies at DePaul and slowly realizing that while I loved reading and talking about books, I wasn't all that cut out for teaching them. Call it a big dose of social anxiety and a lack of the sort of nurturing and patience required for the classroom. It was a strange place, suddenly realizing that you were not at all cut out for the very thing you'd planned your life around. I hit the summer of 1998 with no clue what to do with my life, having survived a bit of a mental bad patch in the late winter probably due to this very thing. A point where the anxiety animal I am used to carrying around became a depression animal that left me unable to leave my apartment except to go to class. That had me sitting in the dark crying most of the time. Thankfully the fog of that had cleared by spring, but I was still drifting without purpose, looking at Ph.D-Lit programs half-heartedly--still thinking maybe I would warm to academia in time. I even took the GRE and applied to a couple (was even accepted at one, an abandoned application at the other.)
I also am thankful to my DePaul professor, who that fall, was willing to write me a letter of recommendation, but who gave me a dose of real talk on academic job prospects at the turn of the century that was probably the best advice I ever got. Basically she suggested I aim higher or don't aim at all--the most notable Ph.D programs in the nation not even a job guarantee, much less the smaller programs I was considering. That if I was just doing it for further interest and study, then by all means, continue. If I actually hoped to land a job, I should try for something shinier, more impressive for my vitae.
In a way, this was incredibly freeing information. If academia as I was set on pursuing it would never yield the fruit I needed, wasn't I better off doing something else with my life? I was also never a very good scholar-I could write a good paper and I loved research, but I never had all that much passion for scholarly essay. They felt like a necessary evil I could churn out, but I was never that excited about them (nor at the prospect of spending my semesters reading student papers into perpetuity.) Really, I sort of just wanted to do the research and not write the essay, or use that research for more interesting things like art or creative projects (thus, though I didn't quite know it yet, a library career was an obvious choice.)
That fall I was also taking a 20th Century Brit Poetry class, and reading Eliot, which cracked something open for me as a writer. T
he Wasteland in particular gave me a certain kind of permission. I had encountered sections of it in an undergrad class, but this was the first time I'd read it in its entirely and felt something stir--the beginnings of my own voice maybe. That collage and threading effect that I did't realize was possible in poetry. It made no sense, but then again, made all the sense in the world. The professor for the class had us listen to Eliot himself reading his own words and I remember this feeling, this frisson, that started at the tip of my spine and carried upward. (Probably why I have such a crush on old Tom, despite him being the deadest and whitest of dead white male poets.)
That frisson led to the first poems I wrote that felt like they were mine that October--that maybe I could do this thing and do it reasonable well. Sure I had written a lot before age 24, skinny little mopey political poems at 19, slick little Dickinsoneque rhymes when I was 21. After a summer of unusual productivity and growth before my senior year, I'd even managed to land some college poetry prizes with some more promising personal pieces that were less embarassing but still not all that great. I still, having only encountered poetry in anthologies, was not at all well versed in contemporary poets. But that fall, spurred by my Eliot spark, I went to the DePaul library and checked out books by Louise Gluck, Carolyn Forche, Anne Sexton, Eavan Boland.
Since I wasn't doing anything else that fall, by grace of student loans and credit cards, I spent all my time not in the classroom writing poems and working on submissions to journals. By spring of 1999, I had a book's worth of material and then some. I had access to the internets on campus, but was still trying things on a word processor at home, printing them out, and SASE-ing my way to places like
Poetry and the
New Yorker and everywhere else listed in
Poets & Writers magazine. Every day I ran expectantly down to the mailboxes in my Lincoln Park apartment building and, with a couple exceptions, mostly got a lot of
no's, but a couple
yes's. That spring, I vowed to have a manuscript by the time I tuned 25 and I did. I vowed that my goal would be to find some sort of bookish, creative job that I didn't hate and spend the rest of my time writing. And, it took an entire summer of false starts and jobs I was not at all cut out for, but I eventually did.
The poems I was writing then seems to be largely focused on allusion--myth, history, fairy tales, literature. My first acceptance from a journal was for two poems--one about Salem witches and the other told from the perspective of Sin in
Paradise Lost. I was only 24, had mostly lived my life thus far, inside of books, so I suppose this was the natural outcome, the natural lens through which I saw things. That spring, I would also be reading Rita Dove's
Thomas & Beaulah, which in may ways keyed me into the storytelling possibilities of poetry. The invention of a narrative word that didn't necessarily have to be mine. But at that point, I wrote about what I knew. Many of these poems, the better ones, wound up in my first chapbook,
The Archaeologist's Daughter, a couple years later, but none, despite how promising I thoughr they were, into my first full-length.
Even still I felt like it was this huge output of I guess what you could call voice, or the voice I was beginning to find...
