ABOUT "LITTLE ESSAYS"

 

Fourteen years ago, I began writing blogs, or as two of my friends called this medium, "writing essays." When I think back to the inception of "A Word's Worth," I hear those two voices urging me to record short pieces about people and events, "exploring the fullness of life," as Rebecca Dale said of E. B. White's essays in The New Yorker. Some weeks I hear the "thud of ideas" White described as the action of his Muse. On other days, I hear the roll of thunder without the lightning of ideas.

Today is noisy enough with occasional thunder rolls, but the lightning flashes are confined to memories. And that's OK because most subject matter in my on-the-cusp-of 86 years old mind lies in the depository of memories. This rainy day I probe the memory of my decision to become a poet.

I was in the sixth grade and had returned to civilization after my father's great folly about the family becoming gypsies via tent camping, sleeping on roadside park tables, bathing in rivers en route to California in 1946. I was eleven years old and sighed in relief when we returned to the small southern town of Franklinton, Louisiana. There, I decided to become a poet in my sixth-grade classroom filled with what I called "country people" (offspring of farming parents). I'd been reading in a sixth-grade reader and delighted in a section on poetry. "I can do that," I thought, and promptly wrote a few lines about my new home: "away from the town's noisy din/from the roar of the cotton gin…" I wrote this following the example of my mother's hero, Robert Louis Stevenson. It's one of the very few rhyming verses I've left to posterity. Well, it does sound a bit better than "A birdie with a yellow bill/hopped upon my window sill…."

For approximately thirty years, I thought about becoming a poet, read a lot of poetry, and finally submitted a poem to The American Weave (now defunct) magazine, which published "My Father's Hands." The American Weave was a literary journal that paid me $18 from the Hart Crane Memorial Fund. Did I become a poet? No, this publishing event occurred in 1967, and I spent twenty more years reading and studying poetry and writing poems "underground." I did not return to thoughts about publishing poetry until 2008, when I moved to Sewanee, Tennessee. It is here that the biggest lightning strike in my life occurred, the flash in 2020 when I wrote Ridges, now on sale*. It's a book featuring my poems that accompany Don Thornton's wonderful paintings of Louisiana chenieres.

And so much for rain-inspired blogs and "come lately" poetry books. Tomorrow the weather may be sunny.

My latest book of poetry, Ridges, is available from me at P. O. Box 3124, Sewanee, Tennessee 37375 and from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.