Stalking The Wild Poet

Port Townsend, May 12, 2010.

I must have spent years here, taking classes, walking slow and closely enough behind Howard Nemerov or Carolyn Kizer so that I could hear there talk about where they each wanted to be buried, which happened to be, at least on that grey day, on top of each other. Howard Nemerov, who, after having read a diminutive older woman's diminutive poem said, "My Dear Madame, there is nothing I can say after reading this poem other than the following old Marine saying: 'You can not polish a turd'." The older woman smiled softly and said "Thank you, Doctor Nemerov." I stood up, left the class and never went back. Instead, I wandered into the poet Marvin Bell's class, which seemed to be filled with clean air and sunlight and that is how I began out ten year friendship with Marvin Bell.

Before I walked out, Nemerov went around the room, asking each of us to come up with oen, "Just One, for Christ's Sake," phrase or line written by any great writer. My brain flooded; we were all afraid of Nemerov with his big head and nose. He turned to me and I burst out with something from Bertold Brecht's GOOD WOMAN FROM SETSUAN, "A decent man is like a bell. If you ring it, it rings, and if you don't, it don't." Nemerov smiled broadly. "How OLD are you?" he asked me. "Forty," I replied. He dismissed me. I was too old to be his poetry workshop girlfriend.


Port Townsend was where I heard Milo, the then-cafeteria chef say to someone nearby, "Oh, these poets! Some knucklehead writes one poem and thinks he's a regular Van Gogh!"

It was in Port Townsend where I sat in a cafe behind two construction workers who said:
A:"Oh Jesus, the writers are back in town."
B: "Oh, wow."
A: " Yeah. They're all crazy, you know."
B: "Really? Wow."
A: "Yeah. EXCEPT for Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Gunga Din."


I kid you not.


Port Townsend was where I watched a pretty blonde woman's face and breasts grow larger right in front of me, she puffed up like a blow-fish, it was a severe allergic/anxiety reaction to her workshop leader, the handsome poet Robert Hass. He has just come by and laid a hand on her shoulder. She nearly passed out. I was one of the few people with a car. The lady next to me knew the whereabouts of the Catholic hospital in P.T. We loaded the blow-fish lady, whose tee shirt, I will never forget, read BARNARD across her ever-growing breasts, into my car and drove straight to the hospital. She flew home that evening.

I studied with Margaret Atwood for a total of six weeks. She terrified me. She terrified everyone. The first time I had to have a one-on-one evaluative session with her I thought I would vomit. She sat down. I sat down. She turned her beaky nose and wild hair towards me and said, "YOU." I sunk lower, lower into my chair. "You don't think you can write, but you can," she said. "Most of these people, including the professors who teach my own work in University, think they CAN write but they can not." I began panting. "But you are scared to death," she said, "and if you want to be scared to death, go to El Salvadore. If you are simply scared because your mother terrified you when you were eleven or sixteen, go someplace where real fear is simply everywhere. You will not only have something new to write about but your illusory fear will disappear and you will have a flight or fight reaction that is worthy of your words."

She was a dynamite teacher. She got me published in a very good literary magazine, just as she said she would. The class couldn't believe it. They figured I'd be the last person in the class to ever get published. It just goes to show. Sometimes somebody says "You can do it" - or even "You're DOING it" - and that sort of acknowledgment or reassurance is the kind that runs and laughs and slides and stops right on a dime.