PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Spring term, 1980, my last before graduation:  the poetry class, given only once every three years, admission by invitation only, accepted me for participation.  In the weekly structure of the class, we studied a different poet, and a different style, each week, beginning, of course, on Monday; and were required to produce a poem by Friday, which would be read and commented before the whole class.

A majority of the class was female.  Most all of us, male and female, came to the class barefoot (in such a warm spring) or with shoeless socks on; all of us wearing faded, bell-bottom jeans. 

But one young man defied both our casual dress styles and our casual attitudes in class.  He was always dressed up, with the kind of lace up shoes that belonged in a fairly wealthy nursing home or on a pallbearer at a funeral.  Buttoned up to the collar, both in his clothing and, I suspect, spiritually and emotionally, he seemed always to be on his way to some unpleasant event, where attendance must have been formally attired; like giving a snitch's testimony in court, or serving an eviction notice on a widow with many children.

My poems, like all the others in our class, were dissected, discussed, and then given a reading by someone other than me.  Even then, I did my prep:  I did not compose one line without checking its grammar; and, with each poem I wrote, I kept the Western Canon (to the extent I knew of it) in mind, as I had learned from Old Possum's example (you look up the reference).  For a senior, I brought good work to the class each time; not as good as the poem of a Delta Zeta sorority girl who wrote, at length, of walking around the campus militantly barefoot, and defying expectations with her baggy jeans and their frayed, fringed cuffs.

ButtonUp, as my then girl friend and I began to call him, always, always, without exception, attacked my poems.  And he did not attack them on the merit, or lack of merit, in their construction; but only on their apparently harsh effect on his spirit.  My central poem of that term, and the poem voted by the class, before finals, as the best poem submitted in the whole term, was an imitation of Wallace Stevens' poem. "Farewell To Florida," which I called "Farewell To Desire."  Like the subject of Stevens' poem, the central, and only, character in mine could not be referenced to a person; but ButtonUp castigated me thoroughly for attempting to pillary, as he put it, another human being. 

About five months after gradgeeating from that place I ain't surposed to menchen, and having earned what I have been criticized as calling a collage edgycation, I was surprised to learn that ButtonUp had admitted to our instructor that his criticisms, of my poems and others, had proceeded from bitter and obsessive jealousy, and not from a fair criticism of the poems as poems.

To the best of my knowledge, ButtonUp has never posted a poem anywhere since.  The last I heard, he had graduated to accept a job with a corporation that failed about a year after he was hired.  Thereafter, he disappeared from the grid.  No loss there.

Starward