Intro to Creative Writing, Rm 218

Every semester someone

mistakes the black and white portrait of Pablo Neruda

for Alfred Hitchcock. And every semester,

there's a student who sighs and rolls his eyes

when the discussion is stalled

 

by those who argue

whether a poet should change

the gaze in her poem from “frozen” to “fixed”.

 

I want to tell the eye-rollers how, last week,

over beers at the Dell, I swooned when a white haired poet

said that in his twenties, he got in a fistfight with another poet

over whether or not William Blake was a genius.

 

This afternoon, I can write the saddest lines.

Winter is coming, and when my father calls long-distance,

I don't listen as much to words he's saying, as I do

 

the spaces between, watching

the sky darken in the window behind my eight year old daughter,

as she sits at the table writing love letters without the vocabulary

to disguise her ache, scrawling,

 

Why won't you take my letters? How would you feel

 if I wouldn't take your letters?

 

This afternoon, I can write the saddest lines,

but when I drive home, toward

dishes, e-mail, laundry, my own impending death,  

 

I'll remember this day,

my students raising their voices, the room

blooming with argument over the merit of a story,

one young man throwing his pen

on the table in disgust,

while Alfred Hitchcock/Pablo Neruda

looked on, smiling,

 

all of us ignoring

the boxfuls of decades-old literary

journals shoved in the corner of the classroom,

filled to bursting with words

that someone wrote long before

 

they ever imagined they'd stop sweating

or singing; long before they imagined

they'd be able to listen to a poem

without taking a swing.