Congratulations to the 2012-2013 Loft Mentor Series winners. How thrilling to find myself among the finalists in the poetry category. The winners now get to spend the next six months or so working with praiseworthy authors from around the country.
I was 17 and in high school when I won my first writing contest with “Dead Boy’s Town”. The story featured a kid who dies and finds himself flying through time, witnessing the significant events of the place where he grew up. It was then published in an anthology called, Stories for the Seventh Generation. Rereading it just now makes me sing and cringe at the same time. It’s quirky and sentimental. There are too many exclamation points and a very awkward use of the word “gossamer”. Why I chose a male narrator as my first person POV completely escapes me.
A few years later, while at college, “In the Garden Where People Throw Their Trash” became my first published poem in Ariston. The poem’s title comes from the farm I grew up on which had been previously abandoned during the Depression. My grandfather purchased it from the bank in the 40s, scattering the squatters living there. Squatters who had regularly thrown their garbage along the south side of the house. The space was cleaned up and turned into a half acre of vegetable garden. Even by the time I came along planting, watering, and playing in it, the garden’s past life continued to reveal itself. Shards of broken dishes, buttons, the odd door knob, or a petrified rubber heel of some boot seasonally surfaced.
The poem is short but many of my poems are due to my Catholic farm girl childhood. Because we were under the constant threat of weather and a temperamental god with earthly clergy to do his bidding, I came to believe that it’s best to say what you have to say, then let it go. The poem may not have the craft and complexity readers look for, but I like the way it looks on the page, there is an attempt at metaphor, and I like the way it acknowledges the determined resilience I observed and embraced from that childhood:
IN THE GARDEN WHERE PEOPLE THROW THEIR TRASH
I tried to dig through to
China with a spoon
then decided I was
going to be immortal
perennial in the spring
growing back after
being mowed
off
a dandelion through years
of famine
roots long enough
to
reach
Peking
***
The Loft Mentor Series winners will be giving public readings in the new year and you’ll all be there to cheer them on, right? Of you course you will. They are part of our literary community and we’re all in this together.
