on becoming a poet

Once long ago when I still fancied myself a young man (I think I was about 25 at the time), a fellow worker at Jet Propulsion Laboratory threw a book down on my desk.

"Y'gotta read this man. Better than whiskey. Better than drugs!"

That was a pretty tall claim in 1967!

But I read it, _Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams_ and gave up all dreams of being a novelist or a historian. I wanted to write like William Carlos Williams! No that's not right! I wanted to write so other people were as moved by my poems as I was by his. Yes, that's it.

So I sat down and wrote a poem. Except it wasn't. I didn't know why it wasn't or how it wasn't but it was only a string of words broken into short lines that sorta made sense but didn't touch the heart. It should've been a clue but I was being dense.

I had to move to Houston then, and I detoured back to Las Cruces and visited a professor I respected. He told me he didn't know how to become a poet either, but I might read poems by Robert Creeley and by Robert Graves, and read what Robert Graves had to say about becoming a poet. It was a good start.

I only lasted a year in Houston and was superbly lucky enough to go back to Las Cruces to study physics on a fellowship, and to study poetry with Keith while I did. By then I had written a few poems by accident. It was embarrassing.

So I studied with Keith and wrote and wrote and wrote while also reading and reading and reading any poet, many poets. Something about that broke me through. I became a poet.

But it wasn't just reading and writing poems that broke me through. Studying with Keith and learning the spirit and the feel of being a poet made a huge difference.

And here I am.

Oh, by the way, I now own The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams volumes I and II. And they're still better than whiskey, better than drugs.

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