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The Road to Damascus by Way of the Great Plains
Kingn Maureen Kingston Maureen Kingston Maureen Kingston Maureen
An Essay by Maureen Kingston
How Do Poets Become Poets? My ears always prick up when I hear or read descriptions of our creation stories. I don’t know what I hope to gain from them. A family tree, perhaps. Too often lately, though, such stories seem to be hogtied in Sunday dress, scrubbed pink for public consumption. The poet-star began writing at the age of nine-twelve-fifteen, the tale begins; kept a journal; had a college mentor or prescient first editor who nurtured the budding poet’s talent (“though my first poems were horrible,” sigh). He or she struggled in obscurity for a respectable amount of time; had a brush with addiction (a nod to sin or Bukowski); won a few contest prizes; then first books; a reading at the 92nd St. Y; and voilà: a full-blown poet is born (and the whelp currently teaches at such-and-such university). I understand the appeal of such stories, their step-by-step progression. I wish it were my story. Is it yours? What if you’re the hula hoop in a room full of ladders? A thirty-five-year-old soldier, home from the war, attends a poetry workshop to appease his VA shrink. It stimulates a nerve he never knew he had. The waitress at the end of a long shift sits alone at the counter, jotting phrases on her order pad. The elderly clerk in a men’s store hurries to serve his customer at the checkout, trying to hold the rhyme in his head until he can write it down. These are some late-blooming, odd-blooming, maybe never-blooming, hula-hoop poets I know. I’m one, too. We’re poets on the margin of poetry. Seems oxymoronic, I know, considering how little regard even renowned poets receive in American society. All poets are marginalized here. Hula-hoop poets even more so. If we’re honest, outside forces aren’t entirely responsible for our fates; some self-inflicted wounds (and exile) are usually at play as well. It’s the matter of volition that distinguishes us from other poets. Laddered poets seem to invite poetry into their lives, while hula-hoop poets, more often than not, feel blindsided by it, as though poetry had jumped from a dark alley and shanghaied them.
Poetry at the Point of a Depression-loaded Gun Grieving. Unemployed. In debt. A graduate school dropout. That’s how I arrived on the Great Plains from upstate New York more than a decade ago. This would be the site and situation from which my poetic self would emerge. Or, more accurately, would be dragged with forceps and chains into being. My husband had landed a teaching job in Nebraska and we were giddy (initially, at least) crossing the country in our Ryder® truck for this new land of opportunity. Neither of us knew what to expect in Nebraska. We didn’t much care, either. Like a lot of recession refugees today, phrases like “contract” and “health benefits” meant we might be able to abandon the gypsy teaching circuit and plan our lives for more than a few months at a time. A godsend. Into this wake followed two additional, unwelcomed guests: memory lapses and relentless mental imaging. The memory lapses were brief, like patches of ground fog, not long enough to endanger, but just long enough to scare the crap out of me. The pictures were another matter: sometimes whole slide shows, sometimes the same image over and over, occasionally traumatic, but largely mundane. A set of keys. An old man inspecting mason jars. Lichen on a rock. This quasisynesthesia afflicts me to this day. Right now the image of a ship in a bottle is nagging me for attention!