The Leaf

C.K. Williams writes in Beginnings:

Poetry didn't find me, in the cradle or anywhere near it: I found it. I realized at some point--very late, it's always seemed--that I needed it, that it served a function for me--or someday would--however unclear that function may have been first. I seemed to have started writing poetry before I'd read any. Although why this should have seemed to have been so much of a sin eludes me now, it reinforced the uneasy feeling that I'd had to create the interest in myself rather than having it dawn on me in some splendid conflagration.

This essay (from Williams's Poetry and Consciousness) revived memories of my first poem "The Leaf." I wrote it when I was eight for the "elementary" division of a poetry contest. The poem went like this:

One day while I was walking
I saw a leaf lying on the ground.
I tried to talk to it
but it would only frown.
I asked it what was the matter
and it answered with a groan:
Because I used to be green
and now I am dark brown.

I won the contest and presented the poem to the entire school. But by the time I accepted my award, I had been called on to recite the poem so many times that I had grown numb to its melancholy undercurrent. I also had a little trouble with the uneven rhyme scheme, particularly the "groan" and "brown" slant rhyme. I saw it as the poem's major failure. By the age of nine, I had turned to confessional prose, which consisted mostly of vicious criticism of my family (scribbled on the green pages of my Cabbage Patch Kids diary) and a few short stories, usually sad tales set in lush forests (cf. The Bridge to Terebithia).

I wouldn't write another poem until I was sixteen, when my crush on a certain high school football player inspired reams of impassioned verse. I was reading Emily Dickinson at the time, which only accounted for the poems' proliferous hyphenation. Most of it was of the "oh! bursting fruit!" variety. Nonetheless, after months of private writing, I decided to submit my manuscript to a national poetry competition. A friend of mine patiently read through each poem and made a few diplomatic comments. I remember that she expressly "liked" a poem about an old man who jogged daily through our street, the rest was "interesting." I never told her that the judges had deemed my work a 3.5, which on their scale meant, "little to no promise." "I have no Tribunal," I grumbled. But part of me was also thinking that maybe I was (oh! bitter truth!) a one-hit wonder.

Around that time a classmate approached me to edit his poem. It had ranked high in a competition and was eligible for publication. His letter was almost identical to mine, with the small difference of "promise." I accepted this task (part self-martyrization) and spent a few weeks with him, crafting a rather fine poem in the end. I couldn't have done this without you, he said. This is my fate, I thought, to be Dorothea Brooke to everyone. In the end, it turned out to be a scam (publication upon payment of $75). But by the time I found out that I too had been duped, I had spent a long winter listening to Leonard Cohen and reading Milan Kundera. With no "splendid conflagration," a good poem came out of that depression. It was published in the high school literary journal, Threshold.

Last year, I was reformatting an old computer and stumbled upon my juvenilia in a folder titled "Poems." I read everything again with some tenderness for the sixteen-year old who wrote them. I saved "the old man" to disk to keep "the one after Leonard Cohen" company and deleted the rest.