Something to Write About

by Suzanne Lee

I was eight years old when I first put a poem on paper. I had sung and dreamed many before then, an unconscious imitator of Nash, Stephenson, and Walter de la Mare, of Shakespeare’s elegant conversational cadences, of the rich flavor of hymns and chants in Latin and English that had pervaded my childhood, and of the wild imaginative jingles of Dr. Seuss. But this was my first command performance, the first formal effort.

Mrs. Fiske gave the assignment. She was a good teacher, and perhaps she prepared us. Memory isn’t linear for me, and if she did, I don’t remember. I can see the grainy off-white paper, the soft kind with the widely spaced, pale blue lines and no margin, and I remember knowing with a complete and chilling certainty that I had nothing to write about.

Form was easy. Meter and rhyme were my native tongue, patterns learned in crib and cradle, and already as familiar as breakfast. I don’t think Mrs. Fiske addressed content. Teachers assigned topics such as “My Pet,” “Why I like School,” and “Climbing Mount Everest,” all derived from supposedly universal experiences or the current Weekly Reader. I couldn’t have put it into words then, but that kind of content seemed a third person affair, a way of holding life at arm’s length. I sensed that poetry deserved better.

I had themes and didn’t know it. They had yet to surface to the level of recognition and expression. It was pure experience, part of me, like the hair on my head. My eight-year-old-mind couldn’t translate it into the mysterious dazzle of poetry.

Dismayed at the thought of a meaningless poem, I made it a problem like the ones about apples, oranges, and pocket knives in my arithmetic book. No meaning, just rules. One plus one is two. Pure technique. No emotional overtones, undertones, or shocking eruptions of fortissimo crisis.

I chose two rhyming words, a faultless iambic rhythm, three feet to the line, and coldly constructed two brief sentences to fill the four lines prescribed by Mrs. Fiske. It satisfied the requirements of the assignment and it was awful. I knew it was awful. It held the boredom and stink of a mud flat compared to the soaring excitement of mountains.

My mind compared this atrocity of rhyme to the acres of impeccable, mind-blasting poetry which I knew from memory. I was horrified and embarrassed. But I was a good child, and I turned it in. It came back with an “A” at the top of the page, which embarrassed me even more. A fraud. I still wince when I remember. No, I won’t repeat it here.

Seared into my awareness was the first rule of writing: you’ve got to have something to write.

Suzanne Lee is a historian and writer. Her prize-winning poetry has appeared in various journals including Snowy Egret, Sow’s Ear, and Colorado Life, and in the volumes  Rise! and Weaving the Terrain. Her poem “Walking Woman” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She has published extensively in nonfiction.