across the distances
Time is tricky. I will think, surely that could only have been a decade ago and it turns out to be 2 or 3. This is especially true of things that have happened since 2000 or so when I moved for the final time to Chicago and into this apartment. While many things have changed, including sharing it now with someone else, even more has not. I still have many of the same things--the vintage cabinets I found at Goodwill, the floral dresser and trunks I bought in the early aughts. The giant overstuffed (though weirdly uncomfy) chair I bought for $25. My tiny writing table (more accurately a vintage vanity) that has served as everything from tv console to nightstand, back to desk again.
But if you go way back, the memories are more defined by location. I recently found myself musing Christmas break of 1995 into 1996. So 30 years ago exactly when I suddenly started writing poems again after taking some time away from them. Most of the break was logistical. I was taking a lot of time intensive lit classes, while also working on theater production and being active the first couple years in student government and volunteer orgs. The writing I did after I started at RC do was essays and papers, and for one semester, some half-hearted fiction exploits for an intro workshop. I have vague memories of drafting the first poem in a while, which I surely still have in my files somewhere, I think on the back of an orange flyer for something on campus. I'm sure it was about winter. And very terrible. I don't remember if it rhymed, but it probably did. I was 21. The only poetry I had read had been in my lit classes, in which Emily D had a big impact. The results were as expected.
And yet, it was the first time I shared space with other poets. Not just the professor, who was publishing her own work, but other English majors in the same boat I was. I did not take many writing-geared classes in those years, opting for the lit track instead with all its lit period electives. So these were people I only knew in those shared contexts. I remember being super excited every week to take home a sheaf of poems and read them while I at the dinner my mom always dutifully squirreled away for me on class nights. I remember dutifully marking them up with a pen, but being also sort of shy and resigned in class (this would also be the case a decade later in my MFA courses.) If the spring and summer of 1993 had been productive for poems before that, this particular semester set a new record. I still have all of them, typed up crudely on the electric typewriter I bought with my high school graduation money, some of them with the comments on them. Some of them handwritten and hastily scrawled with corrections.
I was big on the rhyming, and since I didn't really have much of a doorway into contemporary poetry (that would come later in the DePaul years), I reveled in it. While those poems are about what you would expect from a clueless and novice poet, I often credit my love of sound in poems to that semester I spent so carefully counting out beats and rhyming. Later the poems would get looser and longer (though it would be another three years till they were actually getting pretty good during that second productive period in late 1998 into 1999 when I decided I wanted to actually do this thing.
While some would be embarrassed by early work and want the pages burned, buried, and the ground salted, I keep them because I am somehow weirdly attached to them. kind of like baby and childhood photos that no longer look like you, but feel like an important part of your history. I like to think about bridges through time, a point at which the current version of you can connect with past versions. As I work on promo materials for the new book and am looking to start something new in the coming weeks, I can't help but wave at the older / younger self who had no clue this was what the future would bring. But, oh, is she happy it did.
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