POETRY IN THE PARK 

I would like to claim that I’ve been writing poetry since my left hand was strong enough to hold a pencil. But it was Mr. Burkle’s 6th grade Poetry Notebook Assignment that really got me started. I would give almost anything to still possess the actual notebook, but am sustained by the memory of winning the classroom cover contest, my juxtaposition of the Batsignal melting above a colored pencil sketch of Frost’s Fire and Ice lined up with all the others there in the yellow dust of the chalk tray, rainbow glitter patiently glued upon stenciled title, fracturing light from incandescent grids. Of the five originals included in the collection, all written in laborious cursive, I remember a poem about Batman, one about our calico Scout (named for the girl in To Kill A Mockingbird), and a character study of an impersonal, overpriced, robotic Ice Cream Man.

I raised my game a few notches during high school, writing the requisite angst poems. Most of those have long since been added to the landfills of Central Ohio. Perhaps this is fortunate. The poems got much better when my best friend and first critic suggested revising them. More help came from my cross country coach, mentor, and English teacher, Mr. Edward Bozeman, a poet himself, who shared his work and stayed late after school talking about Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, or to play two on two in the school gym with me and my teammates.

Then—the bohemian years between high school and college. It was 1981 and my generation, trapped in the age of Disco between Vietnam and Generation X, needed a cause. One was not immediately forthcoming. So a few years were spent writing poems in a Victorian Village efficiency, hunting and pecking them out on a manual typewriter, working at gas stations. I taught myself to type in 1987, working through a high school typing text over Christmas break.

There was a cause found—several, in fact—after returning to college in 1986. Through exposure to feminism and alternative politics, I became active in The Central Ohio Men’s Network. This group, providing child care for Take Back the Night Marches, organizing concerts, talking to incarcerated sexual offenders about healthy relationships with women and children, and staging rallies calling for an end to domestic violence, gave me the chance to meet other guys also rethinking what it meant to be a man, and what impact the traditional Western/Anglo-American masculine consciousness might have upon the world. And from this beginning, I began to reassess many of the assumptions upon which my cultural inheritance and socialization were structured.

I finished undergraduate school, BA in English, married in the Quaker tradition, fathered a son, earned an M.Ed, taught elementary school for a decade, and then went back to grad school for an MLIS (Master’s of Library and Information Science). Fourteen years had gone by. There weren’t many new poems lying around the house. And the marriage was over.

Alone, I began to write. A trip to Jerusalem, courtesy of the private Jewish school where I taught, inspired me, standing before the Kotel’s glowing stones in the desert night, traipsing the winding labyrinth of the Old City (where you can lose a few centuries every time its maze of history ratchets a notch or two), stumbling down slick mossy stairs through profound dark, lighter burning thumb, to reach the St. Helena (circa 1st century CE) Cistern in the bowels of the Holy Sepulcher, seeing the treasures of the Israel Museum, breaking down at Yad Vashem. I also found a stillness in which to harness the inspiration studying the life of Buddha, his teachings, and through developing a personal meditation practice bringing together all these influences.

In January of 2004, I surfaced and read at a Pudding House workshop. Jen asked me: From where do you come? Answer: Grandview.

In the last eight months, I’ve published in Talking Leaves: A Journal of our Evolving Ecological Culture, been a featured reader at the Columbus Arts Festival, and the Guest Featured Poet at The San Francisco Oven, handled my share of rejection, and sought open mics wherever they are to be found. Forthcoming work will appear in the Pudding House anthology, CRUDE: Poems at the End of the Age of Oil, and the journal HazMat.

I like to memorize Dickinson, Yeats, the sonnets of Wordsworth, and my own work. I also enjoy hearing many of the gifted regulars at Pudding House, Larry’s and Writer’s Block. Other artists, writers and musicians that matter personally include: Roethke, Frost, Plath, Billy Collins, Ella Fitzgerald, John Lennon, Margaret Atwood, Ritchie Havens, Zora Neale Hurston, Joseph Campbell, Billy Bragg, Dylan (either Bob or Thomas), Isabel Allende, JS Bach, Yoshiko Uchida, Marge Piercy, Wasily Kandinsky, Vivaldi, Frida Kahlo, Michael Chabon, and Naomi Shihab Nye. There are many other contemporary poets I am just getting to know, but not yet well enough to cite from memory. Check back. I will be taking full advantage of the Pudding House Associate discount.

I share custody of my 14-year-old son, Josh, who says he is headed to the NBA next year. My other skills and hobbies that relate to poetry in obtuse, but relevant, ways include the ability to yo-yo and ride a bike no hands at the same time; a decent jump shot; old movies—especially the Ohio Theater Summer Movie Series; and folding origami. I would like to draw and dance more. I also own three bicycles on which I’ve ridden over 2,000 km (more than 1,240 miles for the metrically challenged) since April Fool’s Day. I honestly believe that if we could force the most powerful men in the world to play a weekly game of honest basketball with each other, calling their own fouls in a church gym, or send them on a long, unsupported bike tour, there would be no more war, hunger, injustice, violence, or reality TV.