Silver

I recently realized that I have been writing for twenty-five years. And have been a published writer for twenty. I am not a bestselling author, and in comparison to anyone on such a list and many writers who I am privileged to know personally, very, very few people know my name or my work. Many of my "readers" are family and friends, but even as I write that I realize how much writing I actually generate these days, and where and how often it gets published. As my publication record lengthens and the range of places I’ve been published broadens—-newspapers, magazines, and journals from San Francisco to Chicago to Fort Lauderdale to New York City, not to mention the web—-I realize that a significant amount of my work has been read by people I will never know.

Those twenty-five years began a long time ago in a class at West Valley College in Saratoga, California. I was living with my parents then, and was taking classes at the local community college. Although my awareness of my interest in writing goes back to fourth and fifth grade, it was at West Valley, in English 70, Creative Writing, with Carol Abate, that I really began writing—and reading. I remember many of the students from those first classes. Sometimes the writers’ group I belong to here takes me back through some basic discussion of terms and such; sometimes I sense a lack of authenticity in writing and it reminds me of those who were just dabbling in writing in that class. We have a tradition in my writer’s group of beginning our sessions with a timed writing based on a quote; someone is designated to bring the quote each week, and then we write in response to it for seven-and-a-half minutes. Back at West Valley, those of us who were most enthusiastic about writing were just discovering literature—not the classics, but contemporary writing. I’d recently discovered a writer named Breece D’J Pancake who had been published in The Atlantic (I’d also only recently discovered The Atlantic.) I’d also found Bernard Malamud in its pages. I was introduced to the work of Tillie Olsen. I knew the name Flannery O’Connor, but still thought she was a man. But we were learning; I was learning. I read One Hundred Years of Solitude and felt like I'd travelled to another planet. When we enthusiasts found a writer we loved, or a quote from a writer we loved, we shared it with each other loudly, excitedly. The first person I ever saw rolling their own cigarettes took that class; the first person I ever knew who killed himself did too.

Carol Abate once brought in a poem called “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” by Sharon Olds. Through her books Satan Says, The Dead and The Living, and The Gold Cell, Olds quickly became a powerful source of inspiration for much of the work I wrote in those early years. As mentioned in a previous post, I also made my first encounters with Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky at a local writing conference around that time. I’m more familiar with Hass and Pinsky now than I was then, but haven’t kept up with Olds’ work lately; I’ve been making other discoveries. And among the discoveries or rediscoveries I made recently was my work from back then. After 9/11, I saved all my writing to some of the old hard floppy disks where I’d saved everything I’d written until then; the documents were Word for Macintosh files, and around the same time I switched to an IBM ThinkPad, so I wasn’t able to access them. I just figured I’d get access somehow, someday, but the years passed and the files remained where they were. The floppies traveled with me, however, and I finally got around to having them converted. I was gratified to get the files back after all this time, and happy to see how much of the work holds up. Though I never succeeded in finding a place for its publication, and am not giving up on it, here is the first real poem I ever wrote:


Marathon

dead on arrival
you come
exhaust
-ed defeat
-ed you come
you have pound
-ed to bone
your limbs forward
thrust
unerr
-ing unfail
-ing placed feet
in the dust
with the tight
in your muscle
your face set in steel
going on
-going on
going on
do you feel
how the news
when it breaks
it will
break me in
-stead arch your
back toss your
head with the
rhythm the
tread
the end a
-head break the
ribbons and
ribbons and
ribbons and
yes