The Fore Word

Jack Thomas taught poetry when I was an undergraduate at The College of New Jersey. I sat cross-legged on his office floor and soaked in the early morning light, woven through with Jack’s mellifluous voice, angelic blond face, and hip tutelage.

One day, he played an album called “Baptism: A Journey Through Our Time” wherein Joan Baez sang or spoke poetry and prose to music composed by Peter Schickele. Some of the poets who had indelibly etched their sounds into me were on that album: William Blake, Walt Whitman, e.e. cummings, Federica Garcia Lorca, James Joyce, Countee Cullen.

I fell into a lyrical world of music and words from which blissfully I have never left.

When the semester finished, Jack inscribed the album, and handed it to me. His gesture announced a journey deep into myself.

Children love rhyme. And when a child is mastering language, the way that words and sounds bounce off their tongue and roll around in their mouth can prove particularly intoxicating.

I delight in that phase where words and phrases are not yet fully formed, and syntax is wobbly. I revere that cocoon where the language is trying its sounds out on you, brushing its burgeoning wings against the air in you – with you, their adoring mimic.

“Hearing” a story as it begins to unfold words, phrases, and syntax is, for me, a kindred mastering. George Leaves the Lights ON started as prose, not poetry; and there was no whimsy on his bones, no rhyme in his sinews. No imagination was secreted away in his pockets, in the dirty spaces behind his ears, or underneath his fingernails.

He changed genres at the beginning of a snowstorm that lasted seven days. His genesis was in the sound of silent snow, in the breath of the Weather Gods who live in the mountain ranges of the Oregon Cascades. I can tell you, that in the silence of the air outside, and in, George suddenly began to unfold in anapestic tetrameter, as if Great Cosmic Tumblers had shifted with the blessing of the fecund snow.

“Hearing” sounds sailed me into a language odyssey in my 20’s when I read the dictionary. I wrote down unfamiliar, strange-looking words. When finished, I looked over the list – all the words were of Arabic or mid-Eastern origin. Then I wove a story with those words. I had not an inkling that that story was in me, or to be discovered in Webster’s. The following year, I read all of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets out loud.

In my 40’s, when I traveled to Dublin to study at the Writer’s Centre, I had so deeply immersed myself in the sounds of Ireland, of the poets who taught me that summer, that when I returned home, I took another week off from work so I could stay swaddled in the linguistic spell that had been cast.

This was a lexicon into which I knew I had to periodically and essentially travel so that I could feel my roots, know where I was planted, and listen to, and attend with – my grandmother, who said to me once in a dream: “My country needs you to be a poet.”

George Leaves the Lights ON [OR the importance of being earnest about conservation]