Poems Found in Notebooks #5—There was a time
There was a time when my obsession — January 2008
This series features first drafts of poems found in my notebooks and journals that go back to the 1980s. Each poem in this series will be accompanied by some notes—memoir, context, craft, etc. As you read, bear in mind that the text is a largely unedited draft lifted right out of a notebook—This series is more about process than perfection. Enjoy!
There was a time when my obsession with the second person carried me, and I wrote many things about you, and you loved me, and you left me, and you infected me, and you cheated on me, and you rejected me, and you abandoned me, and you hurt me, and you ignored me, and you chose someone else over me, and you scorned me, and you mocked me, and you ridiculed me, and you believed in me more than I believed in myself, and you destroyed yourself, and I had to watch you go, and you disappeared, and you reappeared, and you exploded, and you melted away, and I sat in the dark, and I walked along the river or the beach, and I cleaned up the blood or the vomit, I drank the piss.
Notes, mostly autobiographical
Not sure what’s goin’ on up there. By the time I wrote this, I was eight years into my relationship with my ex-husband, and we had been married for four of those years. And yet the prose poem above is evidently about my boyfriend Tony Salinas, the man I think of as my greatest love, as opposed to my first love (Randy Snyder) or the man I married (no names, please). Tony and Randy are both dead now, as is Marcos Betancourt, the Holy Ghost of the Trinity I lost to AIDS (or AIDS-flavored alcoholism, in Tony’s case) in the early 1990s. So Tony was already long dead in 2008, and again, I had been with my ex-husband for eight years. And yet it was Tony I needed and wanted to write about on January 12, 2008, when this poem was drafted, never to be revised or in any way revisited.
There’s a lot of other stuff in the notebook in which this poem was found. In fact, Poems Found in Notebooks #1 was in this same notebook. That poem was from 2006, written on the very first page of the notebook. Again, the poem above is from 2008. I would only write a few pages in this notebook every year or so. Even now it is only half full. Maybe I will start writing in it again. As I mentioned elsewhere, this notebook was a gift from a guy I was dating in San Juan in 1999. He bought it for me on a trip to Mexico on which he was taken that New Year’s—what we then called “The Millennium”—by another guy he was also dating.
In addition to poems and other writings, there are notes in this notebook about my difficulty generating new poetry. By 2006, when I first breached the blankness of this notebook, I was out of my MFA program and back into my long-abandoned PhD program in classics, which I was determined this time to finish (which I did—I defended my dissertation in the summer of 2010). I had generated enough poetry by then to have a manuscript put together. But that manuscript went through two years of contest submissions—about 30 contests in 2007, and then more or less then same 30 contests again in 2008—without even an honorable mention. That experience was not just discouraging, it was downright demoralizing, and it dampened my enthusiasm for generating new work.
At the same time, I was loving being back in the academic setting, getting my Greek and Latin back up to snuff, studying for the one remaining exam I had to take before I could start working on my dissertation proposal, then working on my dissertation proposal, teaching an intro to classical literature course at Brooklyn College, and then starting a two-year fellowship at York College supporting faculty development for the Writing Across the Curriculum program. In fact, by 2008, I was starting my dissertation research in earnest, and I was presenting papers at student conferences and professional conferences left and right. I was always a bit of a black-and-white thinker, and it was hard for me to hold academic research and creative writing in my brain slash mind slash heart slash soul at the same time. If my academic work was going to thrive, my poetry had to suffer.
I guess that’s really all I have to say about this poem.
If you liked this post, please consider clicking the ❤️ below. I welcome your comments, too, on the poem itself, or any aspect of this post, or anything you would like to share about the writing or reading of poetry.
I love a good rant!