Journal of a Sabbatical

March 18, 1999

poetry just is

Yesterday Tom and I were talking about how we hadn't seen Patrick since he went off to organic farming school in Vermont for the fall semester. Today I walked into Starbucks and there was Patrick sitting at the counter reading A New American Poetics. He'd been up late last night reading Keats with Ned in Ned's famous basement. I never figured either of them for Keats. Yeats yes but not Keats.

We spent about 45 or 50 minutes talking about poetry. Neither of us like Wordsworth much and I was trying to explain the tradition of separating man from nature. Nature being this wondrous thing outside of us of which we are not a part. I told Patrick that this way of thinking occurs in 19th century naturalists and natural history writing as well as in poetry and literature.

We got onto how sterile and passionless a lot of academic poetry is and how you really can't learn to write poetry in school. Sometimes I forget that Patrick is a kid - his poems are so mature. Nancy always says "he isn't even licensed to drive and he's licensed to use adult metaphors?!?!" Talking with him brought back how close my high school English teacher, Sr. M. Eudes, came to stifling all semblance of poetry in me. Gee whizz, I'm 47 and it seems like yesterday all of a sudden. Teachers have their own agendas whether they're in the local parish school or the fancy prep school Patrick goes to. Creativity and passion are not necessarily rewarded at that level. You're rewarded if you write like your teacher, not if you write like you.

So what I told Patrick, I kind of needed to hear myself. Poetry is just there. It just is. What we have to learn how to do is listen for it and write it down.

Patrick left before I thought to tell him about the thing tonight at the Andover Bookstore: a reading/talk about the Bridge Review: Merrimack Valley Culture with Paul Marion,who's the editor of the Bridge Review, and Mark Schorr who guest edited the upcoming issue: the Andover Anthology. Paul talked about the process and creative vision of the review and read some of his poems. Mark Schorr was talking about his long involvement in Internet publishing (since 1986), mostly about e-mail and mailing lists. He talked a lot about "desperado", a mailing list started by my former coworker Tom Parmenter. Desperado's 15 minutes of fame is lasting a way long time since its mention in the April 1998 issue of WIRED magazine in a feature on mailing lists throughout history. George Chigas read some poetry he had translated from Khmer and also some of his own. Other writers were in attendance but did not read.

At the end Paul read from some of Jack Kerouac's early writings (ages 13 to 21) from the forthcoming collection he's been editing. One of them was on what it means to be a poet. That was the point where I really wished I'd told Patrick to come tonight.