I’m Feeling Poetical
By Nedward Baldewoman | Monday, May 5, 2008
First off, to those of you complainers who wrote in to the paper, let me explain myself. Wait! Before I explain, let me tell you something. Quite frankly, get a life! With the number of letters you all sent to the paper I could have wallpapered a small village in Africa. And I would know, my wife has re-wallpapered our bedroom on nine different occasions. I know all the nuances of wallpapering, so don’t tell me I don’t.
Don’t you all have anything better to do than sit at home and criticize my creative output? All I could think about while I was wading through the hate mail was something a creative writing professor had once told me: “Critics, can’t live with ‘em, can’t live with ‘em.” Notice how she deviously altered a standard cliché and raised it to the level of art. I was stunned then, but little did I realize the true import behind those words. Well, now I know.
All right, the mea culpa. When I said in my last column that the only thing Shakespeare’s “iambic pentablahblah” is good for is putting people to sleep, everyone took it the wrong way. I totally meant it differently: it’s like your mother’s milk. In fact, mothers’ hearts beat in iambic pentameter. It’s a fact.
All those old ladies writing in saying that they were not amused by the last issue, you know what? I’m not amused by you! You folks are probably the same people who ask why poetry doesn’t rhyme anymore, or why modern poems don’t make sense.
You know what else is a fact? You people sure get vexed over the small things. All right, I’ll drop it.
In a way, I’m thankful to you all for suggesting the topic for this current column: poetry. After all, April is national poetry month. As is abundantly clear by my writing, I’ve got style. Metaphors flow trippingly off my tongue, as it were. Sometimes I bellow like a bull; other times, I’m a soft breeze, caressing your ears with near inaudible harmonies. Yeah, I’m good. But with as much talent as I was born with (a lot), I do owe something to a certain professor—mentor, even—that I encountered in my MFA program.
It was probably my second semester at school—April, now that I think about it—and I was floundering. I’ll admit it. I wanted to write the Great American Novel but had no idea what it should look like. I was casting about for some ideas when I entered the Café Pound late one night. I slinked over to a corner, nursing my cup of coffee, when I heard her. She was a poetry professor at my school and her words that night are forever emblazoned in my brain:
The darkest time
is after noon,
when the sun excavates my soul for the world to
see.
Like a whore exposed on an autopsy
table, pale and
emancipated, I am
I am.
The darkest time.
I hadn’t been that ‘in to’ poetry, but this touched a vein. I was steamrolled by the power of her words. It was as if her poem had excavated my soul, and now there it was on the table, all frail and quivering like an epileptic child. But it was beautiful in its frailty, like the ethereal beauty of a recently drowned kitten.
Millie—that was her name—glided off the stage following her poem, and the room was literally shaking with snaps. It felt like the time I got all tangled up in bubble wrap, and my father pushed me down four flights of stairs.
I disabused my former prose ambitions as the shackles of bourgeois slavery. I knew right then that I was done with prose, that I would apprentice myself to Millie and ebb-and-flow with the fortunes of poetry. Later on I found out there is a lot more ebbing than there is flowing. That’s how I find myself in the current predicament: justifying my decisions in a student newspaper from a c-side school in Vermont...or New Hampshire or wherever the hell it is.
But back to Millie, she was like a second mother to me. She taught me about poetry, but she taught me about life too. Clothing: black goes with everything. Arguments: just call ‘em fascists. Teaching: it’s about feelings, and your feelings trump everyone else’s feelings. Smoking: a cigarette is a poem for your insides.
I had never felt so educated, and I couldn’t wait to spread my knowledge—but more about that next time.
April is the cruelest month. Hardly.
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