Anyway, I know you don't want to hear my excuses, no matter how legitimate or well-expressed they may be. So, I will get on with the business at hand.
I didn't set out to become a poet. No, my first advanced college degree was in the much more lucratively promising: I earned a Master's in fiction writing. I wanted to tell stories. My thesis was a collection of short stories. In my last semester, my thesis director suggested I take a poetry workshop. "You have such strong imagery," she said. "I think you may be a poet."
At first, I laughed at the idea. Me, the son of a plumber? A poet? It seemed like a ludicrous notion. But I signed up for the workshop. There wasn't any other class being offered that interested me, and I liked the instructor. She was deeply spiritual and funny.
And I discovered, in my twenty-fifth year of life, that I was a poet. I loved the mathematical precision of word and line. The brevity and power of metaphor. The beauty of image. It was narcotically addictive.
And that is how Saint Marty went to the dark side.
When I am Asked
by: Lisel Mueller
When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.
It was soon after my mother died,
a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.
I sat on a gray stone bench
in a lovingly planned garden,
but the day lilies were as deaf
as the ears of drunken sleepers
and the roses curved inward.
Nothing was black or broken
and not a leaf fell
and the sun blared endless commercials
for summer holidays.
I sat on a gray stone bench
ringed with the ingenue
faces
of pink and white impatiens
and placed my grief
in the mouth of language,
the only thing that would grieve with me.
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| And that's how I went to the dark side... |
