The Once and Future Poet: Essays on 25 Years of Poetry

The Once and Future Poet

essays on 25 years of poetry

Copyright 2012 by Mercy Loomis

Cover image by Plush Design Studio from Pexels

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or uploaded for distribution to others. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work, or portion thereof, in any form, save for brief quotations used in critical articles and reviews.

Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used facetiously fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead (or undead), is entirely coincidental.

Introduction

Have you ever written a poem?

I’ll bet you have. Writing poetry is part of our childhood, in school if in nothing else. Through the medium of poetry we explore our world and try to assign some order to the chaos we see and feel. Poetry is a way for us to organize and record our lives, to try and capture something as ephemeral as the beauty of a sunset or the terror of a nightmare.

Most poetry is written for an audience of one. We write poems for school assignments. We write poems to give as gifts. But most of all we write poems just for ourselves. We might share them once they’re done, but in the moment of creation they are intensely personal.

The sad thing is, most people seem to leave poetry behind as they get older. Maybe it’s because we’ve figured out the world, or think we have. Or maybe we’ve learned other methods to do what poetry used to do for us. Perhaps we learn contempt for what was once so familiar, setting poetry aside as a childish thing because so many have done it, and yet so few manage to do it well.

Well is entirely subjective, of course. And in my opinion, that’s poetry’s downfall. We get self-conscious as we get older. We look at our writing and find it wanting. We discover that our ideas are puerile, our method uncoordinated, or our style so random as to be nonexistent.

And we don’t want to suck. So we stop practicing.

It’s hard to make a living as an artist. Nothing you do as an artist will please everyone, as opposed to, say, being an accountant. Math isn’t subjective. Either you do it right, or you don’t.

When I talk to people about poetry, I often hear variations of: I don’t read poetry. I don’t really like it. I used to write poetry but it all sucked. I threw it all away. I burned it. I’d be mortified if anyone ever read any of the crap I used to write.

I don’t hear this about drawings. No one has ever said to me, I’d be mortified if anyone ever saw the parrot I drew in third grade.

We seem to expect more from our writing, for some reason. We expect it to have grown with us.

I don’t think of myself as a poet, but I’ve written a lot of poetry. A lot more than I thought I had, when I started this project. But I am a writer. The poetry I wrote over my lifetime so far has had an impact on my prose as an adult. In poems I hashed out not only ideas and themes, but also ways of wording things in order to evoke feelings and images.

This collection includes just about every poem I still have a copy of. There are school assignments that have been lost, and poems given as gifts that I didn’t keep copies of. There are a handful of poems I wrote on homemade greeting cards that I’ve neglected to include, and a couple of collaborative poems where I’m no longer in touch with my co-author. But I’m a pack rat. From age eight onwards, most of my poems are here.

Aside from my general pack-rattiness, one other factor contributed to the survival of most of these poems, and that’s the hardbound blank book I call the Black Book of Poetry. Sometime in 1993, I think, I gathered together as many poems as I could find and wrote them all into the Black Book. Even back then I wanted to be a writer, and thought (hoped) that Someday I’d be famous enough that people would be interested in my old poems.

I’m not famous, of course. To be honest, I no longer want to be. I want to have my thousand loyal fans who like my works, and if no one else does, that’s fine.

But I’ve decided to share these poems anyway. And not because I think they’re particularly good (although there are a few gems), and not because I think my fans will like them. I’m sharing them because they represent what I feel is an interesting time-lapse view of one writer. One girl growing up in Generation Y, in a time before cell phones and the internet, during the popularization of the home computer and cable TV.

Most of the original copies of the Black Book poems have been lost. Without that bit of egotism, much of my early poetry would have vanished. I wish I’d done something similar for my prose.

It’s been an interesting project for me. I’d never sat down and read through all of my poems in such a short span of time. All of the essays that accompany the poems were written in July and August of 2012. I make note of that because, like the poems, these essays are also a time capsule. They are my view of my world and my history as of age thirty-five. Who knows, maybe in another twenty years I’ll come back and revisit them, and make a new edition.

The poems are presented in chronological order (as best I could determine) starting with the oldest. Dates and ages are given to provide context. Since my birthday falls very early in the year, for the poems that aren’t specifically dated but do have a known or estimated year, I’m assuming they were written after my birthday.

Regarding spelling and grammar: except where noted, unimportant spelling and grammar mistakes in the poems have been fixed, except for commas that should be other punctuation. Spelling and grammar usages that might change the flow of the text have been retained. It’s sort of random, I know, but I just couldn’t help fixing the worst offenders.

Mercy Loomis

Madison, Wisconsin

August, 2012

Untitled, 02/14/1985

When everything is cold and crisp

and winter starts the season,

you’ll have no doubt that winter came

at all without a reason.

(02/14/1985, age 8)

Comments on Untitled, 02/14/1985

This poem was written on a round white paper doily with a white paper heart glued to each side in the middle. I think this was part of a Brownies activity. (That’s the girl version of Cub Scouts, for those of you unfamiliar with Brownies. Although apparently they now have Daisy Scouts as well. No idea what Daisy Scouts are.)

That doily was stuck to my parents’ refrigerator from the day I brought it home until my parents cleaned off the fridge prior to moving in 1996. I was therefore very surprised to discover it had never been written into the Black Book of Poetry.

Fortunately, I am such a pack rat that not only did I know I still had it, it took me less than five minutes to put my hands on it. Hey, at least I’m somewhat organized.

Another surprise: this poem has really solid rhythm and rhyme. It’s in my favored ABCB rhyme scheme, and a variable iambic tetrameter, my favorite meter. And I’d never even heard Shakespeare at this age.

For those unfamiliar with poetry-speak, iambic has to do with the syllables and the stress. So one foot of iambic verse goes soft HARD when you say it. Tetrameter means there are four feet in a line. So, to use the first line as an example:

when EV | eryTHING | is COLD | and CRISP

I say this poem is variable because the second and fourth lines only have three and a half feet:

and WIN | ter STARTS | the SEA | son

ABCB rhyme scheme means that out of every four lines, the second and fourth lines rhyme with each other, but the first and third lines don’t rhyme with the other lines.

Don’t worry, that’s about as far into technicalities as I’m going to go, and this is a good poem to get that out of the way with.

I am sort of impressed with my eight-year-old self regarding the structure. Now, if only the poem had some more meaningful content…

The Bunny Song

Goodbye Penny, I love thee

Goodbye Crocket, I love thee

All the bunnies in the world

I wish we could play

everyday and in every way

in a clubhouse next to the sea

wishing and fishing

and playing hide and seek among the clouds at noon

and at night all the stars would be our Ferris wheel

and at dawn we could play some more

then we’d nap

you could all lay in my lap

and snooze

all

day

long

(3rd grade, 1985-1986, age 8 or 9)

Comments on The Bunny Song

I wrote this song (it was a song originally) after my classmate Kate brought her two rabbits, Penny and Crocket, in to class. I forget why she’d brought them, but I really liked them. So as I walked home from school that day, I made up a song. I don’t know when I first wrote it down.

For some reason, out of all the childish songs I made up, this one has remained firmly stuck in my head. I can still sing it.

I loved singing. I still do, but not like I did then. I sang all the time, at the flimsiest excuse, and sometimes for no excuse at all. I sang as I rode my bike in circles in our cul de sac. I sang as I walked home from school. I sang in the car, in the house, in the park, everywhere. Sometimes I would pass old people, and they would smile and remark to each other how adorable I was.

Now I am on the other end of that spectrum. I smile at little kids who sing purely to please themselves, without caring whether anyone else can hear them, and remark to my husband how adorable they are. And inside, I am jealous. I wish I could still sing so freely. At my age, people look at you pretty weird if you sing as you walk down the sidewalk. And despite my general to-hell-with-you attitude, I care that they look at me funny. It makes me feel all self-conscious.

I miss that naïveté, the feeling that no one in the world matters but you. And yet, if I had learned to discard it earlier, perhaps I would not have been quite the social pariah that I was.

Oddly, I don’t really like rabbits. I became friends with a girl whose family had pet rabbits. They didn’t really do much. The pooped everywhere and didn’t want to cuddle and sometimes bit. Looking back, this was probably because I only saw the rabbits when there were several strange grade-school-age girls assaulting them, so they probably weren’t at their most friendly. Still, the impression remains.

The Husband likes to say of rabbits, That looks like dinner. Myself, I’m not overly fond of lapin, either.

Untitled (Vacation)

Visiting Friends

And Going Swimming

Catching Butterflys

And Laying In The Sun

Taking Trips To Take Care Of Some Horses

I Also Love To Roame Free

Only Doing Things I Love

Not Only Things For Me.

(spelling left as originally written, probably 4th grade, 1986-1987, age 9 or 10)

Comments on Untitled (Vacation)

I made a notation in the Black Book of Poetry that the spelling was original, so I have preserved both the spelling and the notation.

This was almost certainly written for school, although by now I had probably read Alice in Wonderland and therefore seen the poem in the back where the first letter of each line spells Alice Pleasance Liddell. (Now that I think about it, Carroll uses a lot of iambic tetrameter in Jabberwocky and The Walrus and the Carpenter. Hmm. Maybe that’s where I picked it up.) But this poem has how I spent my summer vacation written all over it.

Lying in the sun. Ugh! That was back when I a.) burned less easily, b.) didn’t worry about skin cancer, and c.) kept forgetting that I don’t tan, and never have. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration…but not much. My exposed skin is slightly less