Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just Starting Out?
People have always asked me this questions. So here’s my best (and probably least helpful) answer.
Back to rummaging through the old poems again. Starting with this one, since people have always asked me this question. So here’s my best (and probably least helpful) answer.
“Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just Starting Out?”
Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave your house
or apartment. Go out into the world.
It’s all right to carry a notebook but a cheap one is best,
with pages the color of weak tea and on the front
a kitten or a space ship.
Avoid any enclosed space where more than three
people are wearing turtlenecks, and that includes
snow-covered chalet, especially those with deer
tracks across the muffled tennis courts.
Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write.
And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle
where a child a year or two old is playing as his
mother browses the ranks of the dead.
Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf.
The title, the author’s name, the brooding photo
on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray
book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher
it gets, the wider he grins.
You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower
falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody
in the world frowns and says, “Shhhh.”
Then start again.
The advice for young writers in this much-anthologized poem is solid: don’t take yourself too seriously and shrug off rejection. I felt this poem needed a light touch, so I poked a little fun at leather-bound journals with silver clasps as well as what I consider dangerous subjects for poetry: snow and deer.
First Grade
Until then, every forest
had wolves in it, we thought
it would be fun to wear snowshoes
all the time, and we could talk to water.
So who is this woman with the gray
breath calling out names and pointing
to the little desks we will occupy
for the rest of our lives?
I give a lot of poetry readings and usually take this one along. It’s a tasty little thing, maybe it’s to poetry as amouse bouche is to food snobs. It’s rare that someone doesn’t come up to me after a performance and say how much they liked “First Grade.” Some people believe that traditional education with its rules, mandates and routines turns high-spirited and imaginative kids into worker bees. Others argue that pushing back and resisting the rules keeps kids’ imaginations perking. Putting that stuff aside for a moment, a teacher in Alabama took this poem apart for her students and had them substitute things for the three items in stanza one.
So every forest had ____________ in it. It’d be fun to wear ___________ all the time. And it’d be fun to _________ to ______________.
One popular definition of poetry is this: the best words in the best order. So are my choices the best, or are there better ones?
Please share your thoughts in the comments below, I’d love to hear…
Ron Koertge (April 22, 1940) is an American poet and author of young adult fiction. Koertge is currently the Poet Laureate of South Pasadena, California. Koertge's honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a California Arts Council grant, and inclusion in numerous anthologies. His young-adult fiction has won many awards, including Friends of American Writers Young People’s Literature Award, New York Library’s 100 Best Children’s Books, ALA Best Book, New York Public Library’s Books for the Teen Age, and P.E.N. awards. In 2017, he was awarded a Pushcart Prize.