Ink Tea Stone Leaf

While I wait for my editor to send me back some more chapters from my novel to review, my mind has been drifting toward poetry. I’ve posted two new poems here in the last couple of weeks, and I’m preparing for a special month-long poetry feature for July that will help me tone up the relevant mental muscles. Not having read very much poetry this year (apart from my ongoing journey through the complete works Shakespeare), I read the collected poems of Emily Dickinson this week, the first time I have actually spent significant time with her work. Since I am as yet unpublished, and she published very little in her lifetime, I recognized something of my own approach in hers. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that most people who write poetry today are influenced by Dickinson, whether they’ve read her or not.

My thoughts turned to my earliest experiments in poetry, a hobby I did not begin to pursue until I was in college (though it seems not to have occurred to me to seek instruction at the time). Back in 2008 or so I started a blog, a different blog, in which to post my experiments in different forms of creative writing, including poetry, stories, and (extracurricular) essays. I continued to post there somewhat regularly for about seven years before my attention waned, though I did add a few things in 2020. While the old blog was in use, I read books and taught myself the craft of poetry through practice, eventually emerging with a level of confidence and competence that served me well in preparing a tribute to my wife Ariele on our wedding day. At one point I collected some of my stronger efforts into a  potential book, but I probably won’t attempt to publish that until after I’ve seen what happens to Canard University.

I haven’t thrown away the papers that I wrote most of my earliest poetry on, but the thought occurred that I might want to collect my oldest work for posterity, and for a chance to reflect on eighteen years of growth. I recalled that on a recent Christmas I received a blank journal with a locking hook on a fancy leather(?) cover, the pages of which were still mostly empty. My intention had been to fill the book with essays on learning and knowledge, but as fancy as the cover was, I found the quality of the paper inside to be lacking. Perhaps it would have been alright in pencil, but I prefer to write by hand in ink, and scrawling with either my fountain or ballpoint pens grew tiresome. But if I were to fill the book up someday, I supposed it might be easier to copy something I’d already written than labor over something new.

So a couple of days ago I cut the first few pages out of the journal (I might return to that project later) and opened up the old blog for the first time in a few years. I navigated to the poetry tab, clicked on the oldest post, and began to transcribe. Then I opened the next post, did the same, and then the next one. By this point, I was starting to struggle.

When I wrote those early poems, I knew that they were not very good. I knew that some of them were kind of dumb. I did not remember that they were as godawful as I find them now. In attempting poetry without any knowledge of the craft, I had flailed about randomly. I used line breaks and punctuation without understanding how they affected reading, and I used words with seemingly no regard for grammar or meaning. If these poems had any virtue at all, it was that they reflected my honest feelings; seeing as I was a twenty-one-year-old student who could not get laid to save his life, this doesn’t always feel virtuous in retrospect. And I simply could not resist explaining every single one of them with commentary about my personal life, because I couldn’t stand to be misunderstood by the statistically zero people who read them.

I know that somehow, someway, I figured out how to write real poetry that was both true to my voice and functionally literate. The latest poems on the old blog, written in 2015 or so, have the competence of experience, avoiding the rookie mistakes and inexplicable unforced errors of my youth. But I was only twenty-eight that year, a mere seven years removed from my first poems. Considering my relatively late start, that’s practically juvenalia.

When does my era of juvenalia end? Maybe it hasn’t—maybe it won’t until some of this verse gets published, however one goes about doing that. But those first seven years do feel distinctly crucial in my development as a poet. In those years I graduated from college, got my certification as a teacher, and roamed the districts as a bedraggled substitute. I traveled to different countries, and lived overseas for nearly a year. I fell in love with, loved, and lost the love of a woman. Through that whole period I frequently struggled with feelings of inadequacy and depression. I also wrote a lot of poetry, teasing out the subtle distinctions of rhythm, meter, diction, and rhyme. I wrote about the things I cared about: love, sex, history, art, science, and mystery. A lot of who I was and who I am is in there.

So I gritted my teeth and I kept transcribing the old junk, in ballpoint pen on the roughest, grainiest, pen-unfriendliest paper you’ve ever seen. I also wrote myself a little note in the beginning, to remind myself that I needed to write a lot of bad poems before I could write the ones I could regard with pride. I resisted the urge to apply the lessons I have learned and “fix” them, save a few commas I couldn’t resist adding or subtracting. If they are to serve as an example, they must serve warts and all.

And actually, not all of them are as warty as I’ve made them sound. I might go through with a stamp later and mark the ones I still approve of. My heirs or my future historians can make what they will of my little artifact.

I might even fix the rougher ones some day.  I could call them “special editions,” George Lucas-style. Or I could just call the old ones rough drafts, like a normal person.

I still have a lot of poems to copy, and even as thick as this little book is I’m not sure whether all of the poems from the old blog will fit or not. For the sake of my pride I hope so. Either way, it’s going on the shelf with Emily Dickinson and the rest.