My friend Gerry Locklin turned me onto poetry in grad school
at the University of Arizona. We were 22
and 23 respectively when he showed me a copy of an indie magazine named The Wormwood Review. I
didn’t need drugs to open those doors of perception. The
Wormwood Review did it for me. I was
studying poetry (and how I hate to see the words study and poetry side by
side. Can’t you just see students
gritting their teeth and wondering what that freaking albatross stands
for?) but none of the poems in Wormwood or Poetry Now or Aldebran Review needed lucubration; they were right there on the page waiting to
be enjoyed.
And they
were enjoyable: goofy and uncultivated
and against-everything-one-should-be-against, they were little celebrations of
another kind of life – not serious, not dogged, not sober, highbrow or grave. They looked liked they’d been fun to write
and they were fun to read. Did any of
these poets imagine their verse was immortal or enduring? No way. Although Wormwood lasted a
long time, lots of the indie mags were as ephemeral as the poetry they
published. Here today, gone –
sometimes – today.
Still, a
lot of us who started fifty or so years ago are still around, still writing,
and often still not taking things seriously. But here’s the thing – writing
fast as I do and in a sense tossing poems often leads to a lot of balmy but imprudent
work. Poems that don’t jell and never
will. Poems that more witless than
witty. Poems that collapse under the
strain of so much whimsy. But every now
and then something very cool happens and a poem steps forward wearing its
jester’s cap and bells and just kills. A little gift from the poetry gods.
Of course,
after that I want another gift, so every morning I give my Ego ten bucks and
send it off to watch a movie about itself, put my butt in the chair and do my
best. Because – as the title up there
says, you never know.
*Ron Koertge is a faculty member at Hamline's MFAC program. He writes poetry for everyone, fiction for young adults, and recently co-authored a young reader series. You can discover Ron's literary work by visiting his author's website or visit his faculty page to learn about him as a professor at Hamline University.
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