Nourishment

A Few Drops from the Well that Never Dries

being an entry crafted in response to a prompt from 
Nourish: 10 Journal Prompts for Cultivating Self-Love

When I was fifteen, it occurred to me while reading Rilke in Mr. Stull’s English class that I would like to be a poet when I grew up. So motivated was I by this realization that I marched right up to his desk after the bell to announce this fact to him. Mr. Stull, a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, would later go on to take myself and several other students to Iowa City to hear his mentor Marvin Bell. But before he would do this, and before he would include myself alongside several peers to create the first ever East Waterloo High School after-school creative writing workshop, he wanted to be sure I knew “You can’t make a living from that.” I couldn’t have found any information to be less relevant.

I remember vividly why it was that I had suddenly decided with great clarity that poetry would be something which would define me for the rest of my life. It was a mood. Or, more precisely, it was a style of thought which carried with it emotional resonance. Later, I would come to realize that part of what was going on there was philosophy, and part of it was psychology — but then, as now, I also knew it was more than the sum of both. It was a rhetorical artistry which walked me into the foyers of both realms as though they shared the same porch, and as I stood in that ambiguity I realized that the questions and the emotions that said questions evoked were at least as important as any potential answers.

suddenly, I was filling pages which described a familiar character who was at the same time an eternal mystery to me.

As a somewhat solitary (albeit sociable) teenager who had a lot of stress coming from the family end of things, this newfound endeavor was entirely practical. During the long periods of time spent alone during breaks between school and my job as a dishwasher, the music of T.S. Eliot’s “J. Alfred Prufrock” guided my pen to craft self-expressions which had been unimaginable a mere year before. I now know that they were imbued with an “aesthetic sensibility,” but at the time I just knew that one year I couldn’t express myself outside of the odd pop RnB song and now, suddenly, I was filling pages which described a familiar character who was at the same time an eternal mystery to me. And alongside Eliot, even the cadences I gleaned from Jim Morrison and Ani DiFranco were useful as templates to forge such compositions. As I did so, time which would’ve otherwise seemed wasted began to become transportive and even productive.

To some extent, I thank these detours for preventing me from becoming a blue collar laborer in Waterloo. Not because I have anything against learning a solid trade, but because they kept me somewhat aloof from the status quo, and caused me to thirst for what UNI could offer me in next-door Cedar Falls. Further, the exercise kept me repeatedly conjuring up somewhat unknown words that would then lead me to the dictionary to fact-check my diction. This mystery of recalling words by sound to create unintended yet strangely appropriate meaning caused me to grow ever more amorous toward the miracle of language. And when we were finally taken to Iowa City to hear Marvin Bell read for the third or twentieth time (the man whose book Residue of Song sat [unread?] on my mother’s bookshelf — a gift from my uncle), this miracle seemed all the more practical as I perceived how this friendly and compassionate man could trust his own intellect while gracefully interacting with such a sophisticated (to me) social milieu.

The gift of this work pays back spectacularly in a kaleidoscope of meaning which constantly renews the wonder of life with novel color and shape.

In the quarter of a century which has followed this initial sojourn, poetry has never left me. It has, in various epochs, served various purposes, including romance, spirituality, and academic achievement. But it has always remained a stalwart in how I relate to myself, and how I conceptualize my experience. The liberty which this artistic, creative mode of expression offers me allows me to tolerate even difficult situations with beauty, grace, and levity.

There have been, hélas, many times when I have forgotten this — times in which Poetry seemed a sort of ego-driven career obligation I was failing to accomplish, another misstep in a series of inevitable screw-ups. This is a sad truth to acknowledge, but it is useful to do so. For I have realized over the past few weeks, laid up as I’ve been following a car crash and spine surgery, unable to physically manifest my typical wanderlust, that even now I have considerable access to this beacon of the human imagination.

Further, I see how at least every year or two I have obtained new knowledge about the art, whether that be via reading criticism or theory, finding new poets, trying out new styles and forms on my own, or just enjoying old favorites in the new light of earned wisdom. The gift of this work pays back spectacularly in a kaleidoscope of meaning which constantly renews the wonder of life with novel color and shape. No greater fortune could befall someone such as myself with such troubling tendencies toward overwhelm and depression. If nothing else, in the worst of all possible worlds, my life will still, at every turn, shine richly with reverberate significance.