"And so you chose poetry."

Beginning a new academic term teaching a college poetry workshop, a formative anecdote from my time at Berkeley recurs and is amplified

“The most important choice in life is a calling—chance decides it.”

An old friend texted me a screenshot last night with no context, and I thought it read like a (GPT3-penned) prose poem. It describes a randomly generated item in a video game he’s been playing, a game sort of like the Sims, he wrote, “but instead of modern life it’s a medieval style fortress management game where you build stuff and mine and generate wealth. And this,” he said of the screenshot, “is one of the texts in the library I built.”

Dwarf Fortress prose poem(?)

I imagine he sent it to me either because we’re poets and it’s about the moon, and/or because I have pride of place as his ‘astrology friend,’ and/or because the critical flatline of the last sentence is triggering and therefore amusing to writers of any type, especially veterans of MFAs, PhDs, or anything else with regular external review processes. I read through the paragraph carefully, understanding it as a prose poem. I have been compiling materials for my undergraduate Introduction to Creative Writing workshop, which begins today, and we will dedicate one of our ten weeks of class to the prose poem. I am also working on a panel presentation about “The System,” a prose poem by John Ashbery, for a conference next weekend at my alma mater “exploring the intersections of aesthetics, ethics, religion, and altered states”.* I am also a writer who identifies primarily as a poet and who has lately been writing exclusively in prose; any of these could have induced me to read this item description paragraph as a poem.

Rereading it, I had vague notions, coming to the final line, of genre theory in general, the lines (ha) between prose and verse, their negotiable boundaries; and I also was brought a particular memory from my time as an overeager undergraduate at Cal. I was in my second college poetry workshop (I would take five or six in total), it was spring of my sophomore year, about a third of the way into the term. I made two friends in that class who would prove serious readers of my work (one of whom just sent me this Dwarf Fortress screenshot), and we all nursed a collective infatuation for the young English professor who facilitated the workshop. He was broad-shouldered, auburn-haired-handsome, ruled by Taurus (“of course,” muttered to myself while investigating his background on the Internet in my leaky bungalow on Benvenue, keen roommate sharing my kitchen chair: one of two signs exalted by Venus). Or, as another friend said later, “We can’t all look like we just fell off a pedestal in Samothrace.”

He was also a legacy academic, something I knew nothing about before coming to university. His mom ran the English department at a famous private college in New York, and he was raised in Park Slope before it was cool. And, of course, he had attended Ivies, and Iowa. Surely the bougie star power intensified our crush as much as the hair tousle and fitted denim.

Enough classes with him had passed that I’d developed the wherewithal not to swoon upon dismissal, missing that narrow window where students jockeyed to exit the classroom alongside him for a chance to share casual words and bag a personalized interaction. Or, more likely, I caught the tail of one of my new friends, who were better at this mini-networking than me, and bolder generally, being male and mutable signs (theory: fixed signs are cautious when it comes to initiating; cardinals must initiate to feel comfortable; mutables are, well, mutable and their volatility manifests in alternating boldness and self-retraction).

At any rate, hunky prof and I ended up strolling together beneath the green-iron gate and down the sunshiny plaza. I can’t remember if my friends were there too or if we were alone; it was after a class when my poem was up for workshopping, and I was still coming down from the nerves of being in the spotlight. It was a prose poem—per the classroom prompt—and the professor had given it his uncommon, subtle, smiling approval, even pulling a line or two during the review to illustrate something to the class about thoughtful use of meter in free verse. Needless to say, I was soaring.

This poem was the subject of our strolling discussion, and he stated that of all my experiments thus far, this form (the prose poem) was my strongest, and I ought to pursue it, which encouragement I buried in my steaming heart and have kept stashed since. He asked me about the process of producing it, and I was embarrassed to have nothing to say: that poem had come easily, not in a rush, but all at once, like a pleasant, mild flow of qi up the spine and down the front of the body into the heart. The act—though a result of discipline, though I could never have identified this quality beneath my hypervigilant 20-year-old personality—had been spontaneous.

Now, it sometimes happens that the moment a revered or idolized teacher, mentor, or micro-celebrity in my story curves down to smile upon my efforts or work, this coincides with the fear-sour revelation that actually, this person is only a person, flawed, even normal, possessing compromised perception and therefore the possibility of downright faulty judgment. Perhaps the humanizing moment of compassion, reaching out from a warm heart instead of rendering a cold evaluation, is what de-deified them, melting moments like these when I was still able only to breathe when I thought I could detect that the air approved of me.

In this case, the professor was listening to me wonder aloud what might suit me to the prose poem, and I was chattering about shapeliness and angles. The neatness of a block of prose I compared favorably with the neatness of a free verse poem where all lines were of identical or nearly identical length. Carving clean, facile rectangles of words, and knowing they contain wild, sensual, odd images, sounds, and ideas, gives me great satisfaction. And, of course, I have always (cf. Henry James, James Baldwin, Ashbery) been proud to compose at the level of the sentence. Otherwise, I mean, you just can’t get the philosophy in there—you’re arranging logical propositions in image, basically—

The professor side-eyed me, through blue plastic eyeglasses, and said, “Let me get this straight. You like making sentences, and you like arranging neat blocks of language. And so you chose poetry.”

I likely blushed to heaven, being so called out. Stunned, I said nothing, or stammered, and soon after this we reached the end of the plaza and separated. Circling the interaction for the rest of my walk home, however, I came to the source of my freeze: he had used the verb choose. “And so you chose poetry.”

This is what didn’t compute. Choice? Had he chosen poetry?—the way my roommate’s parents chose Micro & Cell Biology as her major? Who chooses their calling? I was writing poems at age seven. What seven-year-old consciously chooses, is not moved to choose? I knew myself to be chosen by language, and poetry as my dominant form of expression thereof. Did he not get that same call? Was he a self-selected poet? Are those even possible? Do people do that? Is he a real poet if he assumes such a reality is a matter of choice? If he who fell from a pedestal in Samothrace, who has since been published, lauded, tenured, etc., —oh God, is this what is sneeringly meant by “career poet”? What does that make of my own chances for something like a socially-recognizable writing life? Can I trust anything he or any of his acolytes say or write henceforth?

And so on, into the evening. And so you chose poetry. A weird pang of something like maternal pity kept recurring, too—he had not the subtlety to be aware there is no choice whatsoever, we heed a call—and then immediately marveled at what must be a new PR for superior delusion. And yet, as the years wore on, as he published more and I left Cal and kept pushing my understanding of the genre, I could not help reading him in light of this little episode. Yes, some of the poems he produced were studied, overdetermined. Before I acquired my own powers of channeling, my rivers required steep banks on either side to make them legible (I am talking about poetic form). My volatility can be soothed and shaped by the sentence with far more success than at the level of the line (back to mutables—despite a fixed sun, I am mutable-dominant thanks to wiggly placements of Moon, Mercury, Mars, and Venus). Squares aren’t for squares, man. My naivety couldn’t believe Hunky Prof couldn’t see that—but then, what was I not seeing? Maybe he was simply teasing me, an indulgent egging-on, from the other side of some valley of experience shaped by his own rivers.

*If you’re in the Bay Area next weekend (April 14-15), come check out the documentary screenings and two full days of speakers from all walks of the psychedelic life! The conference is in-person, free, and open to the public. I’m presenting on Saturday morning at 9AM. Details here.

For reference, and because I still like it, below is the prose poem from that sophomore-year workshop. Because I felt like writing prose poetry was cheating, I assigned myself the restriction of beginning and ending every line with the same letter—I tend(ed?!) to embrace every opportunity to Make Life Harder. The FYC song I had not heard for years before it came on in a cafe in Krems, a tiny village outside of Vienna, when I was visiting a few years ago with a friend. Somehow that recursion tied up a psychic loose end.