Signs I might not be cut out to be a poet after all

Camping in October. It's been a while. I had to dig in the basement for my wool hunting hat.

In the past decade or so since I cut loose and slept in the great outdoors during that time of year when "yellow leaves do hang upon the bough," I've managed to destroy my back in a combination of sedentary suburban life, frenzied midlife crisis activity, and dominatrix hobbies...I've said too much. What is safe to say is, a bad back plays hell with the wonders of Mother Nature.

The pain and I are old friends by now; sometimes, he's good enough to tell me how long he'll be around, while other times I have to guess. Sometimes the pain can be dealt with by imbibing a pint of stout and a large piece of red meat (the kind of food that's going to land me in trouble further on in life, at least, according to my doctor, the quack), but the last time I tried self-medication like that, I wound up bloated, drunk, and still in pain. I might have still tried it, you know, for recreation, but the park prohibits alcohol. Along with bestiality and voting Republican.

Other times, the pain has miraculously disappeared by submersion in water: a swimming pool, a hot tub, the beach. This occurred to me, but when I cast a look at the lovely waters of the state park, my optimism withered on the vine.



(And what's this I hear about drinking the water brain causing to my damage? Bunch of ass garbage face ask you me.)

So, for all I could tell, I was stuck with a back that wouldn't let me recline comfortably, sleep, kayak, or otherwise relax. All I could do was walk.

Walking provided my muscles the stretching I needed, and furthermore, kept me doing something besides sitting and thinking, "Jesus fuck, my back hurts." So as I walked, constantly grumbling to myself about the book I could be reading could I concentrate, or the papers I'd tried to grade on the way but gotten sick over, whether because I was reading them in the car or because they're so bad my eyeballs wanted to hemorrhage, I couldn't tell, I started to remember some lines from Whitman.

Yes, I recall Whitman in the midst of nature. Does that surprise anyone? It should. I'm a relatively late bloomer to poetry. I always knew what I hated in poetry: anything I couldn't teach. Which was mostly everything. My first year teaching, I got stuck with a lesson on "Song of Myself," and it took everything I had in me to not take the New New Criticism route on that puppy: "Whitman is singing about himself. He likes himself. Remember that for the test." Later on, I heard of Whitman's penchant for young men, long rambles, free verse, and belief that Shakespeare wasn't the author of Shakespeare's plays. But for years, in some mental file labeled "Whitman, Walt," all I could come up with for the longest time was "He liked nature." Shameful.

I started reading Whitman more heavily a few years ago, and I've dove into him this month for reasons I'm not ready to divulge yet. But the more you read Whitman, the more you get to dig his way of looking at the world. Precisely because it seeks to empower your own:

He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

There's a quote I'm not ready to share with my classes, for obvious reasons. But how about this:

Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems;
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun—(there are millions of suns left;)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books;
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me:
You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from yourself.

All of this is old hat to today's liberal arts public school educators: The student needs worlds to discover, don't step on their inner children (whatever that is), so on. But in his time period, it was revolutionary. And really, look at those lines! Roll them on your tongue. There are millions of suns left? And we can possess its goodness? On our own? Really? I have that kind of perspective in me? Golly!

So with those lines in my recent memory, little wonder they came to me this weekend. I only wished I'd had a copy with me: Whitman once remarked in a letter that "it makes such a difference where you read." He even almost got shitcanned from a printer's job because he took two- and three-hour lunches, loafing around with a book or chatting up dockworkers in Lower Manhattan or Brooklyn. My man. If only he'd been a drinker too, we could have been soul brothers.

Well, actually, as it happens, not quite. Because all in the space of fifteen minutes or so, I tried, and failed, to Become a Poet.

It wasn't as crazy as it sounds, to be honest. The Poet, by my way of thinking, doesn't wear dark clothes, smoke dope, feign an exhausted kind of boredom and world-weariness that may or may not be unique. The Poet, quite simply, sees. Writing it down is only a third of the job.

And I dig the idea of Seeing. It's such a plastic, tenuous thing. I "see" that my back is bad, and that I probably need medical investigation and rigorous physical therapy, but my actions belie my sight, as they do for most people, I suspect. (Not Kim, of course, who was off being an Explorer while I was a Poet--ask her about her neck therapy and you'll see what I mean.) I "See" the nuances of my life--we all do, it's not Divine Recognition or anything--but managing to capture it, via metaphor, symbolism, or otherwise engaging trope--is a skill I suspect everyone should have. We should all be poets. And then not tell anyone.

Others do it better than I. Honestly. I have my favorite poets. My casual acquaintance poets. My Poets I wish I knew better. My old favorite Internet poets and Internet poets worthy of new study. My friends who are poets but don't realize their own depth. And my friends who write poetry because they figure it's easier to insult me with haikus than their own halting vocabularies.

So here I was, a thirty-three year old male trudging a state park, surrounded by nature (and families, I might add, at least thirty percent of which were pretty trashy), finding myself untethered. The normal stresses of the week were gone. Thoughts of bills, lesson plans, obligations and trash to take out had flown the coop. All that was left was the singular voice in my head, and I decided this would be as good a time as any to put it to work. I would capture some of my surroundings, or what the surroundings gave birth to in my own consciousness. I would be a Speaker for the Ages. A Man with a Voice.

Here's what I came up with:

A back
that aches like my own sensibilities
like learning for the first time you're going to die some day

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Why is it that those dysfunctional families are always the loudest?
Is it true that the squeaky wheel gets the grease
or is it simply that
some wheels don't roll properly?

Now, this isn't one of those "look how crappy of a sensitive side I have? hyuk hyuk" posts. I seriously tried to write some verse. Or at least, I tried to try. I don't know. Maybe my head wasn't in it. One thing I can promise, though--any verse I upchuck, unless it passes some sort of litmus test I can only imagine exists somewhere, will not rear its ugly head here. I've got enough sins on my head concerning wastes of cyberspace.

But it was sort of fun screwing around with it like that. I think I'd rather write iambic pentameter, unrhymed, exploring the haunting emptiness of a consumer-driven lifestyle. Clear, crisp verbiage; readily-accessibly analogies; allusions that will force even the most stultified, reality-TV-addicted casual peruser to sit up and go, "Whut? Whut's he talkin' bout? Gots to look that up. Where's mah Wikipedia?"

So, Becoming a Poet just made the List of Hobbies. Right between "Learn French" and "Re-learn the French you were supposed to have learned in college." I offer this not in the hopes of creating an audience, but simply because, like most things dealing with words, the announcement itself has power.