confessions of a baby poet

Today, I woke up thinking about how it was 30 years ago this winter I began sending out my first tremulous and terrible submissions of work. It's completely impossible, and yet there it is. I was 18 and had landed back in the midwest after a brief attempt at being a budding scientist in coastal North Carolina, an experience I enjoyed, but which was increasingly expensive and futile given my shoddy math abilities (necessary for the core requirements of becoming a marine scientist who kinda needs to understand it for chemistry purposes.) So I packed up my dorm room and came back to Illinois, with the aim of studying English and writing and probably teaching at some point. It was overwhelmingly the most sensible thing to do. Despite doing well on my own a million miles away, I greatly missed my family and my cat. Out-of-state tuition even for a state school was a beast. The travel and getting back and forth was a nightmare. I was a far better writer than a scientist anyway, having penned numerous ranty editorials for the school paper, aced every English class essay I ever wrote, and easily won essay contests that garnered me sweet cash prizes and year supplies of Noxema. I could find a school here that would allow me to study the things I wanted to--either in Rockford or maybe Chicago (though that would come later.) I could study English or writing anywhere.

Because I waited til November to make the call on my DOA science career, I landed back in the middle of a brutal winter with no real plan and a little shock at the disparity between the mild barely winter weather  of Wilmington and here. Because I had student loans that needed to stay in deferment, I enrolled at the community college in Rockford with the financial help of my aunt (my parents were going through a rough patch that had my dad out of work and almost stranded us in the mountains of NC for expensive car repairs on our return trip.) I liked the courses though--a class on short stories that introduced me to Flannery O'Connor and Ursula Leguin and one on dramatic lit we got to watch a lot of videos for. A Psych 101 class and a seminar "current" history, which we watched unfold with no internet and weekly issues of Time magazine.  Mostly, all I really remember was Clinton's inauguration details and drinking cup after cup of the vending machine coffee found in the basement of the mammoth RVC buildings where my classes were. 

That spring, I would apply and be accepted to study English at Rockford College with a nice financial aid set up for the next four years, but that winter had me feeling alternately hopeful and discouraged that I wasn't quite sure what I was supposed to be doing with my life. On one hand, I was lucky, as long as I was enrolled in school, my parents allowed me to live with them rent free, so my time not in class or studying was my own. I spent it reading and listening to moody 90's alternative music in my room, but I also spent it investigating copies of Writer's Digest I checked out on the continuing weekly trips to the public library. I was mostly hunting for, again in the pre-internet world, places to send work and go about the business of being a writer. I hadn't even yet read Plath's journals and letters, which I would that next fall, so I really had no idea where to start. 

At that point, I'd been writing poems for a few years, and by writing I probably mean a dozen or so poems about deep things you think about when you're in your adolescent years, mostly out by hand in a diary or on scraps of notebook paper and extra pen-pal stationary. There was probably a decision in there to actually try to do this writing thing, buoyed by those lit classes and the reading I was doing. By reading the magazines and the excitement to be deep diving into English courses come fall. 

What I found in the magazines, specifically the BACK of them, were of course, mostly vanity-esque kinds of anthologies. (I hate the word "vanity" and attendant conversations, but I don't know quite how else to describe a journal that accepts all poems and funds its existence by making contributors buy copies, so I guess that's what we'll call it.)  I kind of knew that was the case, having been familiar with the National Library of Poetry anthologies a friend had gotten into in high school, so I picked and chose among the ones that were less egregious in their pricing for contributors but still gave you a sense of accomplishment and community that I needed.  Not that those poems, and pretty much the others, weren't bad. Oh, they were. Just I also feel like those sad little poems were some of my first forays into "publishing" in its general sense and for that I am still kind of grateful those opportunities existed. 

I still have these anthologies--mine were the paperbacks, not the $40 plus hardbounds, but I published in a few. They mostly have more than one poem per page and lurid flower photographs on the cover. I was so fucking excited by them, though.  I was publishing a little in the college lit journal, had started to get nods in campus poetry awards, but these seemed bigger and bolder. By the time I graduated and moved on to grad school, I had a tidy little stack of them. They would also come with "press releases" they encouraged you to send to local news outlets. Which I quite embarrassingly did. And indeed somewhere in a scrapbook still have some yellowed clippings of my name in the paper, which also seemed very important when you were 19. 

I typed up my submissions to those and elsewhere (even some legit journals I found addresses for) on the electric machine I'd bought with my graduation money and sent them off tucked in with SASES., which I funded with birthday money and bits from my parents for doing cleaning projects. My mother did not understand why I always needed stamps. I would carry my magazine issues, my handwritten poem drafts and endless stamps, around in a sturdy envelope box she'd brought home. From my room and the large desk set-up in the corner forged from stools, plastic milk crates, and a large board, to the living room where I would sit on the floor by the single family TV. Or you'd find me at the dining room table or outside on the deck. 

The poems, which I still have some of on their thin transparent typing paper, were slender little horrors, mostly about feeling alienated and disjointed with bad imagery, no use of metaphor, and nothing really of poetry about them. One of the first ones published was about watching television static after the national anthem (in a time when channels weirdly went off the air). It was probably about 8 skinny little lines. I had read virtually no poetry outside of some Dickinson and maybe some Shakespeare. My mind was a blank slate. 

By spring, as the weather improved and the snow melted, I learned to await the mail delivery each day, usually dashing across the field in front of the house to the box by the road without shoes (which more than once had me stepping on a bee or prickly plants that seemed more numbered in those years than now.) The days rejections or acceptances that  arrived were both wonderful and terrible.  Each month, I collected the latest issue of Writers Digest at the library, and on a few occasions, procured my own from the Waldenbooks at the mall, which at the time, was the only bookstore really in town. I would only learn about Poets & Writers from a teacher my last couple years of college, which would then guide my submissions a little more in later years.  

I continued through that summer much the same, and only eased up a little when I finally enrolled in my lit program and got distracted for a while from writing poems amid classes and rehearsals and for a second, fiction writing (which I was also bad at.)  I wanted to do and be a lot of things in those years, but the writing desire was the steady undercurrent, possibly just a hobby I would do while making money doing other things. I'd write occasional poems on vacations and breaks, but didn't share them.  I would return to submitting work the last couple years of undergrad with a little more knowledge but still not much inherent talent to speak of. But I did return. 

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