Being A Poet by Guest Blogger Su Zi

Being A Poet

As with many children, my first poem was written in school: It was fourth grade, and I had to ask Beth at recess what exactly Mrs. Olsen was asking of us; back in class, I wrote my poem. Later, my mother came home from Parents’ Night and said many kind words about my poem, which Mrs. Olsen had put on the bulletin board. My mother was not lavish with kind words—as I was later to find out about many Depression-Era raised women—and so I paid attention to this thing you could do called writing.

School progressed, as it does, and in sixth grade, I wrote a story for handsome Mr. Kling, with his British tweeds and blond mustache. My memory of the story is only of the structure, a child’s imitation of the science fiction my father loved, involving a character who jumped in time and gender. It would be a few years before I would read my father’s beloved Asimov, and many more before I would read Orlando, but Mr. Kling stopped me after class and asked me how I wrote the story. I might have said I pretended I was dreaming. The story came back graded with a word in red I had to look up: “ Superlative”. Once again, my mother showed uncharacteristic enthusiasm. I began to be very earnest in English class; so much so that by high school I thought of myself as a writer, taking an independent study course which had me writing poems only for a semester.

I began to read poetry outside of school. I began to buy poetry books.

In a rare family vacation during those years, my mother—now a widow—took my sister and me to San Francisco. We walked about one night, and my mother said I began walking ahead a little bit in a purposeful manner. Amused, she allowed me to somehow walk streets I had never before visited until we all stood in front of City Light Books. I remember how shocked I was to find a bustling bookstore open in the evening, how there was that smell inside that only comes from many, many books. I was mystified. I had money enough for one book, and I was guided then purely by intuition, by instinct, by somnambulism. I found myself at the counter with a book in my hand. A man was very kind, he asked me if I had ever read the author (I had no idea then), and told me I had “picked a good one.” The book was Howl

In college, I thought of myself as a writer as well as an artist, and I took classes that reflected this. I transferred schools, took extra classes at other schools in the area, and used every penny of my scholarships on tuition only. It was then that I took a poetry writing class with a published poet—my previous instructors had been teachers only—this was someone who (mostly) just wrote poems and they were published, he had his name in books, he had books. I didn’t know a writer could write mostly poems, that someone could be a poet.

The poetry class read poems that we brought to class, poems for prompts, poems we wrote. There was a whole world of small presses then. There was a wide array of readings one could attend—famous poets came and read their work and we sat in art galleries and listened. In one auditorium, I sat and listened to Allen Ginsberg sing a song to the president called “Birdbrain”. I must have been staring with more focus than most because eventually, we locked eyes. I was to see Ginsberg read a few times over the years; we always ended up locking eyes—a brief moment, a sense of being seen among all those there—and it was that little drop which affirmed and sustained me as a poet.

I had been writing poems, reading them to people in galleries, getting a few published, and occasionally getting a bit of money; the money given for poetry was not then economically sustaining, and it’s even less so now. My college chums went on to do this and that, and over the years, very few of them continued to be poets.

Our lives are ours alone, each of us. How we arrive at poetry, how we write poems, whether we continue to write after the exhaustion of ordinary demands—these will be each of our decisions. I have seen career Poets: and they write and write and write, they submit and submit and submit, some teach, some have full family duties, some work jobs far-flung from books and poetry. I remember well that one morning when I was working at Thoroughbred Farm in the Foaling Barn, and someone reading the newspaper at lunch said that Ginsberg had died. I had to sit down. In that big, concrete, 40 stall barn brimming with horse mommies and their babies, far away from the glitterati literati, I felt a sharp loss. I was paid as an agricultural worker in the equine industry, but I was a poet.

Being a Poet means embracing a connectedness to poetry that has little to do with time or place, although many poets prefer to live in poetry-welcoming communities. I, myself, do not.  Being a Poet means buying poetry books because this is the intellectual family to which we belong; it means reading poetry and reading poetry and reading poetry, writing when and as we can, maybe submitting even maybe reading poems out loud to people. It’s a life decision and a lifetime commitment.

My mother had kept that first poem in the few personal tokens she kept of our family, but those things were lost to me after her death. She may have kept that story. A letter I had written her decades earlier was returned to me after her death, along with a book with my poems included, and it was a raw thing to know someone else had read my private words to her.

In the recent past, I was able to pop into to an AWP satellite event and see that teacher of poetry who was a poet. He had set the course of my life. Although I was probably one of the hundreds of students over the years, who may or may not have become poets, I had and I wanted to see him once again. I wanted to thank him for all the years where life was difficult, but I still had poetry. I gave him one of my books which had a long poem dedicated to him, written to him, a meditation on living while being a poet. Just as this too, is a meditation on being a poet: a life long dedication, a committed relationship, a way of living and being in the world.

Thanks for stopping by.

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