pigeon

I don’t do light reading, dear.

Well, I do.

And furthermore, I’m not convinced the person who said that didn’t either. I wonder if she’s still alive...

According to Wikipedia, yep. That’s good to know.

She signed my copy of her book and called me “brother poet.”

You’d think I would let that go to my head, and mention it every time the opportunity came up in conversation in any way, but nah.

I met her at the Split Rock Arts Program in Duluth, summer of 1994. She taught a weeklong poetry workshop that I attended along with a dozen or so other souls of various ages and demographics, all of us a little hungry for something our schools or jobs or relationships or real lives weren’t seemingly too keen to provide.

I had driven up from Columbia, MO, shortly after graduating from college, in my little red Tercel, with my 1948 Smith Corona Sterling that I’d bought for $10 from the thrift store across from the porn shop — I think it was the only typewriter I possessed at the time. I camped just outside of Duluth (the mosquitos were epic!) and commuted to campus each day for our classes. We did all kinds of fun stuff — cutting up articles from obscure local newspapers, attaching clippings and feathers and other meaningful tchotchkes to little memory boxes, making tactile poetry out of objects. Taking the poem you thought you were finished with and rearranging it, surprising yourself with how much smarter randomness could be than your own overbearing intentions.

I still have the typewriter and I still have some of the poems, though not the decorated box. And the Tercel of course is likely long gone to rust and entropy — although I gave it to a friend of a friend a few years later, so there’s a chance it’s still in operation. It doesn’t matter. Why does it somehow feel like it matters? Cataloguing which artifacts from a brilliant week in my young life do or do not still exist in any recognizable form. Myself, for example: still exist. Recognizable? Hard to say. I’d ask someone from the workshop, but I haven’t seen or talked to any of them since. I have a couple of photographs of some of them, somewhere. One of them said to me after one of our classes, towards the end of the week, “You wake up something that has been sleepy in me.” She was from Madison but was getting restless and wanting to move. That was several months before I knew I would have anything to do with Wisconsin. Ha! Funny how that kind of stuff works out.

That week I drove along Skyline Parkway and realized with a maritime rush that I didn’t need drugs or alcohol to be creative. Quite the opposite, in fact. Funny how it took me literally decades to re-learn that enough times to finally quit poisoning myself. Funny how stuff works.

But there’s more than one way to stop up the well, clog up the spring, foul the great lake of your own authenticity.

A gaggle of us were hanging around after class, talking about whatever. One of us was a silver-haired serious lady who was, I felt, naive about poetry. Exhibit A: She had felt the need to inscribe “A stork is a symbol of hope” at the top of her poem which featured a stork sitting atop one of the chimneys of the now-abandoned concentration camp visited by the poem’s narrative voice. I mean, the stork was already in the poem! How gauche, to point out the symbolism so blatantly. Anyway, this lady, this maladroit poet who surely knew almost infinitely more than I did, at my punk-ass young age, about anything remotely important — she responded to something in the conversation by saying, “Like when you’re doing some light reading...?” I don’t even remember the specific context, but it doesn’t matter. I do remember Carolyn’s reply: “Oh, I don’t do light reading, dear.”

Really? Not at all? Not even in the airport when you have a layover that’s too long to just sit there but too short to go have dinner? Not even while you’re lingering over breakfast before the workshop you’re about to lead? And I know she did have breakfast, because she had told us where to go — a little bakery right down the street from our classroom, where they had — she said so herself — “muffins as big as your head.”

I mean, I get it. She was in another league. She was an accomplished, recognized author. She had been to El Salvador and had dinner with a dictator. She put voices to conflicts most of us would only hear about on the news. And yet, she was a regular person. We talked to her, she talked to us as equals. She wrote and spoke in a language we understood — not some rarefied alien dialect. She was approachable, genuine — not, at least in our experience of her at Split Rock, one to demonstrate erudition for its own sake. So who knows. Maybe I missed a little part of the conversation that would have made it make sense. Maybe there was an inside joke I was outside of.

In any case, I filed that offhand comment in the dossier of evidence that I was unfit to be a poet, writer, artist, or intellectually special in any way whatsoever. If the pros are out here being scholarly and full of gravitas all the time, reading, I don’t know, Proust or Joyce or Aristotle or some shit, with a permanent frown, a convoluted note-taking and citation system, and an epiphany perpetually about to burst forth, and here I am maybe getting around to that chapter of Magic Kingdom for Sale, you know, if I have time after polishing off this bag of Cheetos, then clearly, I am not ever going to be anything more than a pretend writer.

But then again — We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Constantly striving to prove one’s inadequacy to oneself is every bit as cancerous as smoke; equally deleterious to the liver and the brain as overindulgent drink.

Speaking of artifacts, I still have — and treasure — that signed book. I also still have that dense, invisible dossier. But I don’t feel the need to lug it around on my back all the time anymore. It’s more of a curiosity these days (most days) than a burden. More of a decorated box, a 3D concrete poem about letting go, playing with words, giving fewer fucks, connecting with real people as your real self, learning what’s important, laughing at your own pretentious bullshit. Honoring people. Listening to what’s real about what they’re saying, knowing that you aren’t always qualified to judge what’s supposedly real, or important, and what’s not.

There’s a stork sitting on top of that dossier.

The stork is a symbol of hope.