TheBanyanTree: to be the poet

[Mike Pingleton]

Maxine Hong Kingston is one of my favorite writers. In her recently
published _To Be The Poet_, she writes of a friend and the friend's 'poetry
room' - a place designed and furnished for the sole purpose of writing
poetry.
 I've yet to finish the book - I've never gotten beyond that passage. A
poetry room? One whole piece of a house devoted to one pursuit, a 'hobby'
generally regarded as worthless by most?
 Having a poetry room infers having time to go into the poetry room and come
back out, at some later time, with a sheaf of poems. "I'm going in there
now. Will you be around later? Yes? How about if I come out around eight,
and we can have a late supper and I'll read you what I wrote."
 I can only reconcile to this strange world by assuming that these people
write poetry, while I write poems. Poems are different from poetry, perhaps
in the way the hokey-pokey is different from modern dance. Poems are things
I scribble out over coffee with ten minutes or so to spare on the odd day,
here and there. I go into rooms to write poems but generally there are other
things happening in the room, like coffee drinking and scone eating.
Sometimes the room is the room I work in, as I drop what I'm doing to work
on some line that just occurred to me. Please don't tell anyone.
 Poetry is Dylan Thomas, wearing a fisherman's wool sweater and writing in a
stone room with a whiskey on the mantle, while sheep bleat outside the open
window. Or Emily Dickinson, alone at her small desk, writing for a world
beyond her death. Poets, poetry? Yes. I write about leaves and ladybugs,
crows in a winter sky. I have yet to pull the soul's tender agonies from out
the can. I don't even like to see the word 'soul' in any verse. I am
currently working on a poem about a chicken.
 I'm not really sure what drives me to write these things, these poems, to
scribble six lines on a post-it note and leave them on the bus. There are
certainly easier ways to impress friends and family; most of my family isn't
aware I do this, and my dear wife doesn't really 'get' poems or poetry. What
do I want? Not an entire room. I'd like a little more time, really. Time to
dawdle over a dangling foot and a second cup of coffee. Time to chew on a
knotty bit of meter and a bear claw. I hate it when fragments of verse
doppler right out of the brain to Nowheresville. When ideas and metaphors
hang out of reach, all rumor and ghosts en parade.
 I want more time to decide about poetry and poems and what I'm supposed to
do about them.
 Mike