another April | 1996
In my musing over April' past and past projects, another year is heavy on my mind recently. Mostly because it occurs to me that there has been a span of 30 years(!) between these two fixed points in time. In 1996, I was still a college student in undergrad. I was all of 22. Youth is all about not realizing how young you really are, but in 1996, I felt like I was as old as I was going to get. I was living with my parents and perhaps enjoying the last year of only minimal obligations as an adult. Within a year, I would be off to the city and my first apartment and grad school. But in 1996, I was finishing up my senior seminar on Milton, which I was ill-equipped for with no/minimal knowledge of Christian mythology and history and only rudimentary knowledge of Greek and Roman myths--also important with that text. I was struggling with the language, much as I did in my teen years with Shakespeare.
In a couple of years at DePaul, I would revisit Milton and find it much kinder since I was more experienced and focused than one usually is last year of undergrad amid things like play rehearsals and grad school applications and figuring what you want to do with your life. Considering Milton, and re-watchings of Supernatural, are the bulk of my religious education even now, this makes sense. I found when I came back to Shakespeare in college, it too was much kinder. I thought of this again last Friday when we got to see a production of 12 Ophelias, a swampy southern spin on Hamlet's aftermath. I particularly wanted to see it given my own Shakespeare dramatic wanderings that I'll be working on soon with Macbeth's witches. It very much felt like Tennessee Williams telling a tale through Shakespeare's idiom. I liked it so much I bought a copy of the play that will arrive soon.
That spring semester of 1996, I was also taking my first poetry workshop ever. A couple years before I had enrolled in a fiction writing one. After seeing a few stories, the instructor, one of RC's alum done good, offhandedly suggested my long and rambling Faulkerian sentences might be suited better for poetry. He was right of course. I already knew that, having been scribbling poems since I was 14 or so. I had already started publishing, first in vanity-esque anthologies you'd find in the back of Writer's Digest, and in the college lit mag. My poems were pretty bad, but I was writing a lot of them, so was getting better. That spring, I had, up to then, one of my most productive spurts of activity, pounding out poem after poem on the typewriter I'd procured with high school graduation money.
The workshop was the first time I'd really shared much of my work, with classmates or instructors. I got into it though, writing more and unfortunately going through a terrible end-rhyme period that maybe everyone needs to go through. I still say those poems help me hear the rhythm and sound of things in my work, something that would serve me well in the poems I wrote in the decades after that. Thankfully, all of us were similarly bad. for the most part, though for a host of different reasons. That semester of badly rhymed Emily Dickinson-inspired poems, however, got me, after a couple of years of focusing on theater and my studies, back into writing more at all.
The subsequent summer, however, would be the real yield of that workshop the previous spring. By summer, I had cast off the rhyme like a stale coat and dug into some of the best stuff I had been writing. These poems would eventually win me a couple poetry prize nods before I graduated, and gave me a nudge toward submitting work to more established journals. By the time I landed at De Paul in 1997, I was submitting quite often and developed an acquaintance with Poets & Writers. It would still be a couple years of writing and getting better before I managed my first official publication, but I was getting better, that was the main thing.
Every once in a while, I pull out those undergrad poems on their weirdly-thin typing paper filled with cross-outs and whited out segments. For some, I even have the original messy handwritten drafts. As someone who has hasn't drafted much in writing, only typing, since the late aughts, these seem too quaint and anachronistic to throw out even though I should.
What did I write about that semester? If I remember correctly, it was probably a lot of the same strange and gothic fuckery I write about now..lol..just much more overwrought and rhymed at the ends. Poems about artifacts and museums, about the execution of John Wayne Gacy, abandoned houses and formidable forests.
You know, the usual...
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