Twenty-five years ago today, I became a poet.
I was working in a boarding school in northwestern Connecticut, and my only afternoon and evening of freedom from duties was on Monday nights. Worcester, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island and Hartford, Connecticut were each about an hour away, and I was at a loss as to what to do with my time off. The entertainments of Hartford and Providence on a Monday night seemed thin, but I found an arts-weekly calendar that indicated a poetry reading in Worcester on Monday nights that started at a reasonable hour.
I tried to write a poem or two, the day before. I didn’t know anything about poetry, so I wrote some sonnets — I knew the form, at least, and I could figure out how to make rhymes and meter work, sorta. I remember writing the first three or four in a long stretch while the kids were at afternoon activities on Sunday, and deciding all of them were terrible. I wrote two more during a study hall in the evening while supervising the students as they did their homework for class the next day; and another one while some of my students were taking a quiz on Monday. One of the poems seemed good enough to share. It probably wasn’t.
School ended, I did some errands, and then got in the car to drive north to Worcester. I hadn’t known that there had been a major fire in the city that had killed a number of firemen, who had been searching a dangerous commercial building to rescue homeless squatters who’d already fled the structure. The city was filled with poisonous, foul-smelling smoke from the fire. There were policemen on every corner as a strange, cold sleet fell from the sky as I drove into town on 6 December 2024.
The host of the poetry reading, a gracious lady whose poetry I admire very much, Sou MacMillan, made me go first. I read a couple of sonnets that I’d written the previous day, and sat down. There was a smattering of applause from a small audience, which seemed much more alert to the sirens and flashing police lights that passed by outside, than to any of the poets who read that night.
And that was a beginning of a 25-year relationship with a muse, of sorts.
On remembering the 25th anniversary of my first
performance as a poet, in Worcester MA on 6 December 1999
The Refrigerated Storage had just burned,
And all the streets were fogged with sulfured smoke.
Blue and red lights flashed each time that I turned,
each street pinioned by the town's surly yoke
of officious fury at its losses:
vaporized insulation, frozen fear
and burnt men buried under stone crosses
In dark dusks at the turning of the year.
Here came I, with some dull, thoughtless meter,
poesy of light or forgettable verse —
heedless of worry in the host's patter
or the ways the applause was clipped and terse.
Much I've wrote since bears burns from that night's coals:
Fate bound with Fire, and with mortal souls.
