Becoming a Poet

We're approaching National Poetry Month, a good time to take stock:I suppose at the most mundane, I became a poet when the poet-part of how I see myself began to take precedence over other parts, when I had a few good publications and saw that if I continued to write poems, there might be a future for me. But “being a poet” feels to me more a condition than a vocation. It’s not even about loving words. “How did you learn to love words?” is an easier question to answer. I learned to love words because my father loves words. He’s 93 now and he writes me one or two 3-5 page letters a week, banged out single-spaced on his old manual typewriter, all about the economy, religion, how he’s managed to fix his clock, his constipation, whatever randomly occurs to him, in no particular order. He loves to recite poems: “The Highwayman,” “Jabberwocky,” “Invictus,” “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck,” and on and on—he belonged to a choral poetry-recitation group in high school, back when the ability to say poems aloud was part of what it meant to be cultured. He loves to look up words: the dictionary was the most-used book in our house, pulled out at least twice a day.But as I said, that’s the easy question. I could have become a journalist, an essayist, a novelist, or a banker, I guess, with the same credentials. I think when the love of words strikes the longing of the heart for—shall I call it God?—poetry is the result. When I say God, I mean the insatiable longing to see more, to know the truth of things, to see through, to love the ordinary details so much that they crack open and let us in on their secrets. All that is fancy language and I don’t know what it means. All I know is that when I write poems, I am after a holy mystery that I can only touch the hem of.So I need to start over with my self-analysis, with my young spirit, in a pew in the large First Christian Church in Columbia, Missouri, and then its replica in miniature in Fayetteville, Arkansas, my young spirit held breathless by the language of the King James Bible, language that climbs to the highest rung to try to say what can't be said, what can only be revealed in song and stories lifted toward the heavens. It is that—what can’t be said—that I fell in love with. I mean seriously in love, romantically in love, passionately in love. I have never gotten over it.The first poem I remember writing, I was in the sixth grade. My father and I rewrote “”Twas the Night Before Christmas,” beginning “’Twas the night before Christmas/ and all through the house,/ not a creature was stirring,/ not even a louse.” I suspect this poem was almost entirely my father’s invention, but I claimed it since he was saying it and I was writing it down. I probably did think of some of it.In Junior High, I know I wrote some poems I can’t remember and no longer have. I was more occupied with survival in the world of my peers, with my survival in life in general. That went on for, oh, the next twenty years or so. However, poems did get written during that time. In high school we were given a choice in English class of writing an essay or a poem. I chose poem. I think I still have that one somewhere. It was sweet and had a grandmother’s rocking chair in it. I got an A.This is the beginning of an essay for the book Sydney Lea and I are writing about growing old as poets and people. It goes on from here, some good news, some bad. Stay tuned.