This week in my introductory writing course we covered poetry. I am not much of a poet though I tried my hand at poetry in junior high and felt pretty sure I was the next…well, good poet (I didn’t actually read poetry so there was no one I was aspiring to be). I occasionally wrote mushy or cryptic poems the year I met my hubby.
At that time, I was all of 18. In 1982, when I was 20, I wrote A LOT of poetry. Apparently I REALLY loved my (now) husband.
One poem (pictured above) I wrote in junior high garnered some attention from my teachers. It’s not because it was well written, but because I used the word “caressed”.
Now, this is 1974 and apparently that was not considered a 12-year-old student’s type of word.
My dreams of being a great poet came to a crashing halt. I recall having a very intense discussion with my English teacher about that word and explaining that my mother owned a rhyming dictionary, a regular dictionary and a thesaurus (she was/is a writer/broadcaster). Words were a big thing in our house.
I was one of a very, very small number of children that came from single parent families at the time; as a matter of fact, I cannot actually recall any one else whose parents were divorced. I always felt our family was under scrutiny. A few years earlier, at this same school, my brother had been suspended because he (and my mother) refused to have his hair cut – it was below his shoulders at the time. Therefore, I wasn’t surprised about the line of questioning from my teacher about my word usage. It did crush me that he questioned my ability, though.
(That being said, a year or so later, when my marks plummeted and I withdrew from all extracurriculars, not one teacher asked why. I’m not sure I would have told them that one of the coworkers was sexually assaulting me, but it would have been great if their concern was at least consistent.)
This week, I wrote a ton of poems. The criteria for the assignment was that it had to be focused on our senses, full of descriptive language. I realized, through this process, that my writing is not particularly descriptive. And, also apparently, I am very stuck on the experience of drinking tea.
Let me explain.
At least 5 of the 10 or so poems I ‘shortlisted’ for submission were about tea. Mainly about an experience I had a month or so ago.
On Fridays, I go to a writing workspace in east Toronto. A group of anywhere from 3 to 10 writers go to this space and write in silence for 3.5 hours.
I mean silence.
The kind of silence that when I poured my tea, I could hear the tea pour into the cup. I could hear it swirling. I could sense the motion from the sound. It was striking.
It was crazy loud in this quiet space. And every time someone else poured their tea, I heard it again. I was so enamored with this sound, I wrote about it that day and it became a bit of an obsession with all my writing.
I am working on a longer fiction piece and I put it into the piece. I wrote about it regularly in my daily freewriting. Finally, I put it into my poem this week. I even called the poem awoken because I felt like that tea experience was a bit of an awakening.
Tea and writing – a good pairing.
awoken
my breath
enters my body
cascades like a soft wind
down my throat
fills my lungs
then departs
with the unwanted
residues of the night
a chinook
clearing winter’s chill
the tea
pours into the cup
a sound unheeded
in the thousand times
I brewed before
ears attuned
to the soft spinning
of liquid in the cup
an eddy in
the hot current
the beauty
of snow on the path
crisp, glistening
filling my heart
my waking and
sleeping selves
spirits lifted
burdens displaced
fireflies illuminating
the direction home
