One year ago this weekend,
I participated in the Texas Poetry Calendar reading at the Georgetown Poetry
Festival, held in the beautiful Georgetown Public Library. Just before the reading began, I was in
the restroom, washing my hands and trying to calm my nerves. (Reading my poems aloud in public still
gives me a tinge of fear and excitement, and I am grateful for that.) The restroom was crowded, and somehow I got
into a conversation at the sink with a woman in her sixties. I asked if she was going to the poetry
reading and she said no, she didn’t know about it, and I told her where it was
and what it was for. She wished me
luck and then turned to go.
Almost to the door, she
stopped, turned and said, “It really caught me off guard when my mother died…”
(pause) “…and I found some poetry that she wrote.” Then she told me the story. She never knew her mother wrote poetry; she’d never shared
it with anyone. But after her
mother’s death, she found a beautiful poem her mom had written about her
life. She said, “We had it read at
her funeral. But it needed an
ending and I tried and tried to think of what it should be. Then one night at 2 a.m. God gave me
the ending and I had to get up right then and write it down so I wouldn’t
forget it.”
I heard a lot of beautiful
poetry that day, but nothing as beautiful as the story I heard from a stranger
in the restroom.
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| This picture of the Georgetown library does not do justice to how gorgeous it is inside. |
Today, I was back at the
Georgetown Public Library for this year’s Texas Poetry Calendar reading, and I found
myself thinking about the woman I met last year and her mother.
I don’t know anymore
what people think of when they picture poets. I’m fairly certain that the idea of berets and snapping
fingers has started to fade by now, but I can’t be sure. Now that I have joined ranks with
the poet world, I no longer even remember what I used to imagine when I heard that word. Poet. All I know is that, whatever it
was, I was wrong.
If any specific and clear-cut image comes to mind when you picture
poets, then you can be sure that you’re wrong too, at least a little bit. Because the only one-word
description that aptly fits the poet community is people. Poets are
people. They are everyone.
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| When I typed "poet" into Google, this is the first image that popped up. |
Today, I listened to over
twenty poets read their work. They
were young; they were not-so-young.
They were grandmothers; they were single men. They wore shorts and t-shirts; they wore dresses and had
tattoos. They read poems about
cancer and teen suicide; they read poems about mermaids and cold showers. They read poems in Spanish and poems
about Indian monsoons and poems about cows in tiny Texas towns. Halfway through the reading, Mike
Gullickson, who organizes the Georgetown Poetry Festival with his wife Joyce,
stepped up to the microphone and brought the audience’s attention to the tables
that had been brought into the room for the luncheon following the
reading. He pointed out how they
had been delivered in such silence that no one even noticed their arrival. He said, “I thanked the guy who brought
them for being so careful and quiet, and he said, ‘It was too beautiful to
interrupt.’” Mike’s voice choked
with emotion when he spoke.
I don’t know what you think
of when you picture poets. But I’m
here to tell you that you might be surprised to find out who we really
are. That woman I met in the
restroom last year certainly was.
