In graduate school, my professor assigned us the task of reading the newspaper and responding to something found there, an assignment I found maddeningly difficult, but appreciable for its exercise of palpating that place between the personal and public, the unbright line between the intimate and civic. Then in my the final semester, in the fall of 2001, as I was cobbling together my thesis in a refurbished horse stall–a quiet place, two miles from my attic apartment above a busy doctor’s office, an event occurred of such magnitude, that its ashes continue rain down into everything I’ve read or written since.
I may have been one of the last people to learn of the World Trade Center attacks because in the horse stall, I was alone save for the sound of skittering in the walls.The office didn't have a proper bathroom so when I drove back to town to for lunch, a store cashier began to narrate all the unfathomable events, one by one, in sentence form, so that her words struck my mind once, and then again, then her words collapsed one certainty, and then another. What I also remember was, at the end of that day, Galway Kinnell read his poems at the Galaxy Book Shop.
In the years following graduation, I fumbled forward in search of that lucky intersection of life and art. I was working in dairy barns and flower fields, in food service and eldercare, in tutoring and teaching, ever-scanning the want ads of the local paper in search of something else, something more.
In 2005 I landed a dream job as a writing instructor at a small college, where I was obliged to offer a course called “Writing and Speaking to the Issues,” wherein I coaxed students to find the nexus between their interests and the world around them. As we spent class after class steeped in source material and case studies and persuasive arguments, I longed to include another form of expression. Perhaps as an outlet, or as the culmination of wanting to unite verse with the age-old forum of public discourse, I pitched a monthly poetry column to my local newspaper, the Chronicle.
What if the men who died miserably for lack of what is found there, (as goes Williams Carlos Williams oft quoted ‘Asphodel That Greeny Flower’) could be saved instead, or perhaps die less miserably for having found a poem by a Vermont author like Julia Alvarez, Major Jackson or Ruth Stone in newsprint? For five years I conducted this news + poems experiment, introducing a poem pertaining to season and place by a Vermont writer, and by the end, I’d found if I’d saved anyone, it was only myself, as I veered my back toward newspaper work, this time entering by front door, to write about issues affecting neighbors and friends, to find myself daily treading that tricky place where the personal and public mingle. I’ve got printer’s ink on my hands, again.