"I Never Had Any Intention of Becoming a Poet"

Current Living Arrangements

I never had any intention of becoming a poet.

Playwright, yes, screenwriter, maybe—perhaps one day a novelist—but never a poet.

Poetry was always a silly thing, especially as a lifelong pursuit. What poetry I had written in college as a drunken student was dark. The kind that took itself way too seriously, that tried way too hard to be "deep" and meaningful, to get at the soul of life (ha!).

My poetry-writing started out so innocently. I had some musicals I wanted to write, but who would write the songs? My one effort at collaboration had not worked out.

Maybe I would be the one to put the rhyming words down, and perhaps one day apply the music. That's when I somewhat magically landed in Charlottesville, Virginia, a town filled with musicians. Maybe we could collaborate. 

I started writing lyrics.

Attending an open mic at the much-storied Prism Coffeehouse I had hopes of kicking off my songwriting career by reading original lyrics to the aspiring songwriters in the audience. I hated so much that the emcee, Aer Stephens of WTJU, introduced me as a "poet". 

I informed the audience that what I was reading to them were actually "pre-songs".

They laughed at my Catholic confession and goldfish song ditty. Aer said afterward I might have a future in radio advertising. 

Ominously, he said, my longer piece sounded like it should be a poem.

God, how I hated to hear him say it. I'd hoped it might make an historical ballad like 'Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald' — Gordon Lightfoot's classic I'd tried to get a rhyming scheme from.

I set off on a poetry-writing tear, anyway, almost inexorably. 

Many writers of other genres passed through a poetry-writing phase, it seemed, though usually earlier in life. Maybe my playwriting would benefit from the detour. It's what was coming out in terms of artistic production, so why stop it? 

Write something that morning, read it an open mic that night — poof! you're a poet. None of that finding of directors, financing, spaces, and producing your works for the public that go into making a playwright.

Narrative poems came first, the long kind that tell a story.

Then came sonnets on a variety of topics. They appealed to my intellectual, philosophical, make-a-point mentality. After creating a few "starter sonnets" — just the first four lines — I remembered from my schooling somewhere that a four-line poem was called a "quatrain".

Then came quatrains on life and love and wheels, whatever.

I even dipped my toe into what I call beat poems — what some might call "slam".* That opened up political rants, politics being something I'd been trying to keep out of my art.

I'd like to think I innovated two types of poetry: sentence and word poems.*** I'm sure others have written in these styles, but I don't know of anyone to give them names, define them — or write a bunch of them as a category.

I've now written something on the order of 500 poems,** surprising, especially since I never thought I'd become a poet at all.

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*"beat" comes from "street beat"; never liked the whole idea of "slam poetry", the term or the style.
**more like double that as of 4/20/13. For a breakdown as of 6/11/07 see Rough Reckoning; for an accounting of the poems at this blog, see "Reckoning: April 9, 2018".
***since added X-style to poetic forms I've originated.