my inspiration to become a writer

before i went and did something crazy like write a book, i wrote poetry. learning this art taught me the most important skill in writing: how to say more with less. it’s easy to write a few hundred or thousand words on a subject, but the true art comes in cutting that in half or a third or less, keeping the meaning, and making it crystal, sharp, intense, and true.

my first formal poetry course was an intensive month-long class when i was eighteen. during this class something happened that changed my life: dr. peter lucchesi, who many students thought of as an eccentric, crabby old guy who rarely gave compliments or “A” grades, wrote four simple words at the top of one of my poems: “You Are A Writer.”

i’m not sure what peter saw in these first poems that i wrote between the ages of 18 and 20. looking back on them now, i can see that they are not that good. they are the words of a teenager, and from the perspective of a now-32-year-old, they seem a little trite. i would write them differently now, but they’re solid in that they’re based in true real hard emotion. but to have his words “You Are A Writer” directed at me, coming from someone i respected and feared as much as peter, was just incredible. it gave me much-needed confidence.

this is something i wrote for peter when i was about nineteen, that i still think is decent. i have added one word, removed another, removed an ellipsis, and modified three line breaks… but other than that, it’s unchanged from the time i wrote it.

first.

white
clouds drift, hot & slow, from one horizon to
the other side
of the earth;

a boy sits on the edge of a lake
fishing for trout with line and stick
thinking of her; now, will the fish
take his bait? will she…?
his black hair falls again
into his eyes; he
ties it back with a red cloth
and thinks of her soft back
her belly,
his own strangely new desires

fish glide around rocks
in the silt at the floor of the lake
one finally snaps at his hook
the boy reels it in sharply
and it suffers the pain in silent flopping, eyes rolling
he pictures the girl, tossing her brown hair
layer upon thin layer
of rich mud
he says softly, “i’d do anything…”

it is now dusk and the fish has stopped moving
the boy places it in a bucket,
stands,
and walks toward home

many years from now
remnants of the night before
will hang lifeless on the chair,
or strewn across the floor
and he will think of the lake,
and he won’t know why,
and he will think,
“the cars sound different
and the fish look strange.”