The first poem I ever published was chosen by my best friend Adrienne to be included in our 9th grade yearbook. I called it “Alone.”
Alone, always alone,
Staring always staring,
Out of a window,
Never leaving it.
Watching children,
And remembering,
Yes, always remembering,
What it was like,
When you were young,
Alone, always alone.
Adrienne was the yearbook’s literary editor, and I still remember the anxiety I felt when she told me she’d chosen this poem to publish. Indeed, when I read this poem now, I can still remember how deeply painful the loneliness it describes was to me and the conviction that I was, somehow, somewhere inside myself, as old as the speaker of the poem sounds. I was scared of the responsibility entailed in making the experience in the poem available to anyone who wanted to read it. They could hold me accountable for what I’d written, ask me to explain myself, subject my words to a kind of scrutiny I associated with the courtroom: Was I telling the truth in this poem or was I lying? I also remember, though, the way that writing the poem seemed to give substance what was going on inside me, making it real to me in a way that I had never before felt real to myself, and I guess I was also afraid that this reality was still too new and vulnerable to made public.
Then Adrienne told me about how the poem made her feel. (Unfortunately, I have no recollection of what she said.) For the first time, someone I cared about was taking my writing seriously as more than the product of an overly self-indulgent adolescent mind. She thought I had something to say and that helped give me the courage to say it. It’s not that I think I would not have become a writer without Adrienne’s support, but it was largely because Adrienne took my writing seriously that I came to discover the making of poems as a way not only of coming to terms with the life difficulties I faced at the time, but also of creating possibilities of being that had never before occurred to me.
I needed those possibilities of being desperately. I’m always a little reluctant to write about this part of how I became a poet because I still have some residual fear, even after all these years of being a poet, that I will sound either like I should be baring my soul on a TV talk show or like I am trumpeting the therapeutic possibilities of poetry, and not like someone for whom becoming a poet was, concretely, and in ways I am still learning about, a matter of survival. I don’t mean to sound highfalutin. Simply put, writing poetry taught me to believe I had a voice I could call my own, that because I could hear myself in my poems, and because — as I began to show my work to more and more people like my friend Adrienne — others could hear me as well, I was not, in the core of my being, the invisible boy I thought I was; and I thought I was invisible largely because of the violence and sexual abuse I suffered at the time.
Perhaps understandably, violence and abuse, sexuality and gender, our bodies and how we live in them, have all become central concerns of my work. I called my first book of poems The Silence Of Men because the silence I had to break in order to write poetry in the first place was the particularly male one that makes it so difficult individually and culturally for men to speak honestly about precisely those central concerns. In 2002, I gave a talk in New York City as part of a panel at The Sophia Center on poetry and spirituality in which I spoke more discursively about the relationship between and among the sexual abuse I survived, my writing and my own spirituality. I don’t want to repeat here what I have already said in that piece, which is called “The Rectification Of Names,” but you can read it here on my blog if you’re interested.
In 1990, I published a poem in Five Fingers Review #8/9 called “To Carve A Shape Through Silence.” It was my first attempt to write about my friend Joey’s suicide and to connect my grief at his death to how I felt about — or, rather, to trying to figure out how I felt about — my father and the fact that he was no longer a part of my life, and then to connect those two emotional experiences to my writing. There are two strophes from that poem that have stayed with me, and I suppose that, together, they form a kind of ars poetica. Here is the first one:
Writing is like that. These lines
on the page, the sound
I imagine of my language
in the hollow of your ears,
how a sentence never dies, but seeps
into us, until,
like soil, we turn it out again,
useful and alive.
And here is the second one:
Learning to write poems
has been easier than loving people
and harder than counting syllable.
But words grow
and sentences shape
time into meaning, and learning
to let that happen
has been learning to shape my body
(and I am my body)
into somewhere I can live.
Richard, I am waiting for the installment of ‘My Daughter’s Vagina’ you withdrew…and how strangely I am always writing about writing, love and body…like here in my latest: Preludes in January
Great lines those from you…