When my daughter was 14 months old, we lived in Seattle, and she and I spent a cold, cloudy winter afternoon at the Woodland Park Zoo.  Her favorite animals were the uncaged pigeons she realized she could send into flight by running towards them.  A day later when we saw the newspaper’s front page, we discovered that a reporter had photographed us. There she was in black and white, bundled up in her quilted ski jacket, flowered corduroy Health-Tex pants and woolen hat with a long tassel falling in her eyes, arms wide open ahead of her as she chased the birds.

In the photograph, I am standing a short distance from her watching her enthrallment with the birds.  That they landed again only a short distance from where they took off was part of the fun for her because she got to “chase” the birds all over again. Where my daughter was happily mesmerized by her power over the birds, I was melancholy; deep inside; I hated that what took flight landed so soon and only a few feet away. I had given up believing that relating deeply to stories and to poems and thinking of phrases that sounded emotionally interesting–“bear grass arranges my eyes,” “the hint of gin in juniper,” “the iron blue charity of reservoirs, ” “between the glow places, the bodies of fireflies against the night like the unlit portion of the moon”—meant something about my interests in life.  I would be a teacher and a mom, I believed, not a writer.  But even if I was not brave enough to seek what I’d later learn was part of my calling, I vowed that I would facilitate my daughter in becoming exactly who she was inside.

When she was a bit older than during our winter zoo visit, my daughter said, “You have breasts that I call onions.”  She asked, “Does a snail ever forget its shell?”  She said, “Mommy ran like raindrops and floated up to the sky.  She hung her umbrella up on a cloud and fell back down to earth watering the flowers.”  She began a story, “When I grow up and you grow down.”  I heard the call of poetry in my response to her words, but I had little idea of what to do to write poetry.  I knew even less about how one established a place in one’s life for honoring small phrases and the way they might resonate with the world.  Although I enjoyed writing, especially rhyming poems when I was in junior high and persuasive essays to my community when I was in high school, I didn’t know, even with a BA in English literature, how anyone actually became a poet. I couldn’t see that becoming a poet is open to anyone, that one did not have to have an ancestor who directly bequeaths the poetry family fortune. When one writes poetry because one has it inside to do so, one comes to recognize the legacy of other poets and inherits it.

 Eventually, I began looking for some time away from diapers and teething biscuits. I picked up a copy of the University of Washington’s Free University class listings.  It listed a poetry writing workshop taught by Michael Magee, MA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington.  Here was someone telling me writing poetry was something I could learn to do.  I couldn’t imagine how I’d learn, but I enrolled.

For eight weeks, Michael Magee led our small group of six or so seated on the lawn outside of campus buildings in responding to the poetry-in-progress we brought in with copies for all to read.  Michael Magee taught me a language with which to respond to the words written down so far and a language to begin to mine for more words, the ones I didn’t know I had.  He gave us poetry writing ideas and the expectation that we would have something to share with the group the following week.  Not only did I have the opportunity to take the writing of my beginning poems seriously, he gave me the knowledge that there were other poetry teachers available to me right where I lived—those who had taught him in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Washington.  At the end of a summer of studying poetry once a week on the lawn, I applied for admission as a non-matriculating student to poet David Wagoner’s workshop two afternoons a week in Parrington Hall at the University of Washington.  To apply, I had to submit sample poems, and I did have a few starts from my efforts in the summer class.  Parrington Hall was historic among Northwest poets, I later learned, because Theodore Roethke had taught there, and David Wagoner had been his student.

Attending David Wagoner’s workshop was a trial by fire.  I was new, older than most of the students, and certainly less versed in poetics.  In this mixed graduate and undergraduate workshop, I was one of the only true beginners.  If you were serious at all about your work, you didn’t study with David Wagoner right off the bat.  You learned from others first and for longer than I had spent with Michael Magee.  David Wagoner was renowned, the editor of a prestigious literary quarterly, and a demanding teacher, who called us all by our last names with a Mr. or Ms. in front.  He was as serious about poetry as my father had been about climbing the corporate ladder.  I had never witnessed such energy behind the creation and protection of literature.  Somehow, no matter how harshly students eager to win Mr. Wagoner’s respect criticized my beginning efforts, I felt unwounded.  I had found the place where I could become a poet, the place where writing poetry was the highest goal, where we were called to find from our beginnings true manifestations.  Better yet, we learned to cast our words as a net to harvest bounty from the sea of our subconscious.  And we learned by becoming attentive witnesses to this process in one another.

David Wagoner told us if we were to learn to write well, we should make it our business to read nearly every poem written in the English language.  I began.  It never seemed possible to reach that goal, but every step along the way was important.  I started by reading Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton, Erica Jong (whom Wagoner disliked), Maxine Kumin, David Wagoner, Theodore Roethke, Richard Hugo, Nelson Bentley, and Richard Blessing. Next I found books by William Stafford, William Matthews, Steven Dunn, Robert Hass, Colleen McElroy, Sandra McPherson, Tess Gallagher, Allen Ginsberg.  I returned to some of my old favorites from college, William Carlos Williams, John Keats, William Wordsworth and William Coleridge. Reading contemporary Northwest poets, contemporary American poets, and English poets I made a stab at beginning to meet the goal.  Later I would add the poets Ai, Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, Robert Pinksy, Stanley Kunitz, W. H. Auden, Lucille Clifton, Linda Hogen, Joy Harjo and Sandra Sanchez among others.

When my first poem came up in class for discussion, David Wagoner broke the silence after I’d read my draft by calling on the one person he didn’t address as Mr. or Mrs. “And Richard speaks?” I heard him say as he often said when no one else raised his or her hand.  And Richard spoke, “Not to be pejorative, but…” My ears took in his complaints about my poem draft and I earnestly wrote notes in the margins of the class handout.  “And in the penultimate stanza….” I certainly don’t remember what he was saying beyond the vocabulary.  Pejorative and penultimate.  I looked both up that night in my dictionary.  To this day, I consider them my graduate student words.  I also never use them. Saying “next to the last” seems okay to me and keeps me feeling connected to the idea that not hiding behind vocabulary is good for poets.  And being “negative” or “critical” is not what I am interested in as I foster my own writing and that of others.

The next draft I brought in was inspired by David Wagoner’s advice that I not reduce myself “to a laconic whisper,” but instead practice various voices and belt some things out.  A few weeks later, I completed another draft of that same poem and brought it into the class.  “And Richard speaks?” I heard David Wagoner say once again.  And Richard spoke “pejoratively” and I don’t remember whether he mentioned the “penultimate” stanza. What I do remember is that David Wagoner praised the poem.

In the weeks after that first university level writing class ended, I did two things: I submitted the poem to a magazine and learned that Richard’s last name was Speakes.   When the poem was accepted by Writer’s Forum, a then new publication from the University of Colorado, I was flung into misery because of its sensitive topic. Although I knew the person it was about would not read that literary publication or even know anyone who did, my misery was not alleviated; this was because it was about guilt, not fear of being found out.  It was about fear of daring to tell my truth as I felt it.  This poem was an explosion I had let out of myself. It scared me. My misery was about acknowledging that if I were going to write poetry and raise my children sensitively, I would have to tell how I saw things.  I would have to SPEAK.  I knew from reading poets on poetry that poems make us change our lives because once we write one truth, poetry demands more truth.  I was as if I lived in a newly developing community where bulldozers were pushing away the edifices I had used to keep myself silent, allowing sunlight into a new clearing, allowing the occupation of prepared but undeveloped land.

As I raised my children and wrote my poems and studied with more and more teachers, I learned the following about becoming myself in the face of relationships with people who didn’t recognize the poet in me:

l.         You can’t raise children to be their own persons unless you know who you are. (But writing poetry can help you learn who you are.)

2.      To know who you are, you have to pay attention to things that usually few of the people you know want to know about you. (Writing poetry lets you know what those things are.)

3.       To know who you are, you must stop paying attention to what many people are telling you they like about you. (To write your poems fully, you have to allow the poems to tell you things you might not want to hear.)

4.      To pay attention to the things that very few people have ever suggested you listen for, you must put at risk much of what others want from you. (Every time you work on a poem you practice this attitude and stance.)

5.      Putting what others want from you on the back burner makes these others fearful, threatened, and unhappy.  You have to separate their fear from your seeking or you will live the wrong life. (Same with writing poems. If you carry other people’s opinions with you while you are writing, your conscious mind may try to conceal your true insight. I can remember the many times that “I am unhappy in love” poems ended with “you are wonderful” last stanzas because the student poets didn’t want their partners to feel bad or discover that they were unhappy.)

6.      Other people’s unhappiness with you for living your own life is secondary to that of spending your life failing to embrace what exhilarates you and it is secondary to the happiness of your children, which is dependent upon you being an authentic self.

Children love those who seek wholeness and are drawn to help them.  If you are lucky enough to have children in your life, listen to them and read them your poems—they recognize and appreciate the sound of truth.

As I sit here today, my daughter is nursing her 8-month-old son.  She has just listened to what I have written, and with her response, I have reworked some of what I wrote for clarity.  As I spend time with my daughter, I enjoy observing the way she lets her baby tell her, even at this early age, what he needs, what peaks his interest and what annoys him.  He doesn’t like a room to be dark unless he is sleeping.  He is intrigued by air temperature changes.  He wants to grab everything in his reach, of course. As he teaches my daughter who he is, she knows when he is hungry, bored, tired and impatient.  He is always allowed to be himself. “Toby,” she wrote to me in a caption to a photograph of him in front of pillow made to look like a monarch butterfly, “wasn’t a little Tobypillar anymore; he was a beautiful Tobyfly!” Like a monarch that migrates thousands of miles, this child will spread his wings and find expansive breadth to his existence.  Twenty-eight years ago, recognizing my own failed flight, I committed to the process of finding truth through poetry.  That patch of sidewalk those pigeons landed on so long ago is far away and so is the feeling that my spirit is limited.