UPCOMING APPEARANCES:

Thursday, July 31: Radio interview, WINA Charlottesville (AM 1070), 9:00-10:00 a.m.

Thursday, July 31: Barnes & Noble, Charlottesville, VA, 7:00 p.m.

Saturday, August 2: Schuylkill Valley Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia, PA, 9:00-10:30 a.m. nature walk/ 10:30-12:00 reading and signing

Sunday, August 3: Prospect Park Boathouse, Brooklyn, NY, 8:00-10:00 a.m. nature walk/ 10:00-12:00 reading and signing

Some of my pals over at Readerville started a poetry discussion. Every week, a new poem is posted, and we throw out opinions and speculations about it. We started with W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming," and we're now in the middle of John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Soon we'll be doing Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, all sorts of folks. And I'm really looking forward to it.

Poetry has haunted me for decades, but somehow I've never quite admitted that I believe in it. As a child, rhymes of all sorts tickled me, whether they were the pieces of A Child's Garden of Verse that my mom quoted or the irresistible cadences of A.A. Milne. (I defy anyone to read "James James Morrison Morrison Willoughby George DuPree" aloud without settling on the beat.) By fifth grade, I'd graduated to Ogden Nash, even going so far as to compose an ode to him:

I thank thee, Ogden Nash, for thou
Hast taught me, with each hymn,
No matter which words I may use
The lines will always rhymn.

Soon after that, I wrote a piece of free verse called "Sunsets by the Sea" which was pure and sincere and oh god it was awful. Fine for a ten-year-old, I guess, but scary to contemplate now. In fact, I live in fear that it's still lurking somewhere among my mother's papers, and will be produced by her with a triumphant cry during some awards dinner someday, and of course she'll insist on reading it aloud, and they'll revoke my award at once.

Adolescence is of course when the Muse is most likely to settle on one's brow and insist on giving the poetic part of one's brain a strenuous workout, and I was grunting and sweating with the best of them. Much of what I produced in junior high is not unlike what is often produced through grunting, but every once in a while I'd catch lightning in a jar and write something good. In 9th grade, poet Ellen T. Johnston-Hale (better known as Mrs. J) came to our English class and did a workshop. I wrote a wistful little piece called "Mustard" about a childhood fantasy my friend Bruce Crumpton and I had entertained, and I knew it was good as soon as I read it over. Alas, Mrs. J heard me read it and didn't have much to say about it. I was floored; this was primo stuff, after all. How could she not notice?

I guess she was distracted by something else in class, somebody ogling someone else's body or carving obscenities in a desk, because the next day she came back and announced that "Mustard" was quite excellent and that she must not have been paying attention before. I was mollified, and took her turnaround as a sign that I was meant to write poetry.

And I did. Repeatedly. I published several poems in my high-school literary magazine, the Different Drummer, some of which do not embarrass me today. Moreover, once I'd learned to play guitar, I started writing lyrics; when I picked up piano, I wrote even more. From high school through college and beyond, I gave my Muse all she could handle, and when I became a teacher in Fayetteville, I would often find myself composing poems during planning periods, desperately trying to keep my creative juices flowing. Haiku. Sonnets. Free verse. Villanelles, for god's sake.

What I never did, though, was attempt to publish them. I've never sent a poem to a journal or magazine. At one point I assembled a few dozen poems with the idea of submitting them to the Yale Younger Poets series, but now that I'm 40, I'm no longer eligible. I did give one (a villanelle) to an online magazine, only to realize after it appeared that I'd sent them a flawed copy--the last line of each stanza was missing a word, meaning the line didn't scan properly. I felt like a total dolt. (This is why I'm not sharing the name of the online magazine.)

And every once in a while, I'll spot one of my better efforts--"Teaching the Lake" or "Mennonite Socks"--and think "I should really do something with that." There's no money in poetry, as Ian Shoales observed, but maybe I should at least send a few things out. If nothing else, maybe I can finally get that damn Muse off my brow.
7:24 AM

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