Notes on the contributors to the MassPoetry blog
Learning to read and write
It’s the 7th grade and our English teacher who gives us Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky to read. Reading out loud, during class, we come to understand and relate with some of the reasons the teacher heaves that heavy book at us. He wants us to take a different path than the one laid before us.
Our working class town with one library also offered me a different view. I knew early on, my life would evolve around pigment and words, a community of artists, poets and musicians like the ones I read about. There was a crime in the choices I made. My parents thought I would be a housewife and mother and I did try for a while but the punishment, not being myself, took time away from the larger books I wanted to read and write.
When 6th grade rolled out the boys on one side, and girls leaning against the wall, I was writing poems behind closed doors:
Your blue eyes deeper than tooth paste
all gooey when squeezed. If I could brush my teeth
with your look i’d be clean and you’d want
to brush-up against me, wash over me
I filled notebooks with melancholy and angst, with longing pre-teen kisses. My parents were so strict, I didn’t dare speak, let alone write. Looking at boys was forbidden, my body language hidden in the bedroom. My punishment was a day stay in my room and daydreaming became the paper I needed to express those unrequited love poems.
We meet once a week, the writers range in age from young to older than young. We call ourselves the Bagel Bards and meet once a week to discuss everything. We quip and jab our verse. We enjoy philosophical or poetic challenges. We all hear the whispers. We all suggest a book to read. I’ve been reading Friedrich Schiller, “an anthology for our time” suggested to me by one of the bards. I’ve been reading the book all summer and I’m only on page 77 of 256 pages. When I started reading Proust I got to page 25 and gave up, throwing it onto another pile of need to read books. Books I have to read out loud in order to understand.
And who wears tight pants
and kills himself
and why must I lick
the last page
and frame and hang
how to characterize
what I read
what I write
[...] Our working class town with one library, also, offered me a different view. I knew early on, my life would evolve around pigment and words, a community of artists, poets and musicians like the ones I read about. There was a crime in the choices I made. My parents thought I would be a housewife and mother and I did try for a while but the punishment, not being myself, took time away from the larger books I wanted to read and write. More . . . [...]