A New Lease on Poetry (and comics)

2019 saw a lot of significant firsts, but I’d have to say that one of the most important ones was discovering poetry again. I had never quite fully left it behind, but for years, I felt very uncomfortable calling myself a poet—I wrote, at most, a poem a year, and I had published a total of 3 poems through a contest when I was finishing my undergrad degree at the University of New Orleans.

A few months ago, my friend Aubrie, an old classmate of mine from The Evergreen State College, told me that she still had an old end-of-quarter portfolio I had assembled as part of an independent contract she and I and some other friends had done back in the old Hippie School days.

I have this thing where sometimes I can’t stand to look at my old writing. Sometimes I find it hard to understand my former self or his preoccupations. In many ways, I feel like that kid had his head on backwards, and that if he’d figured out a bit more a bit sooner, I’d be farther along both in life and in my career.

I suppose this started to change when, for some reason, I went back and took a look at an old comic miniseries I’d written something like thirteen years ago called God of the Depths. The most surprising thing about it was the scripts weren’t half bad. A little tightening here and there, a little polish, and I felt like they’d make a decent series after all.

One attempt to get GOD off the ground didn’t pan out—I found a brilliant artist in India who was willing to work for cheap, but health issues scuttled that before it could really go anywhere. Then I showed the scripts to my friend RJ, and he decided to get behind it. He connected me with a killer artist (more about her later) and she’s deep into work on issue 1. So, looking back can be fruitful. Well. And. So.

Aubrie mailed me the old portfolio and I took a look at it. Some of it—a lot of it—made me cringe. Especially the short stories. These things were all composed before I met Octavia Butler and before she as much as ordered me to apply to Clarion West. These things were written when I still wasn’t sure my writing would ever make one thin dime or that anyone outside my circle of friends and family would ever care about it. The stories had some essential problems that kept them from standing up, and I saw nothing to go back in and fix. Any stories from that era that were worth anything, I’d already gone back and re-written from the ground up, and honestly each time I did that, the story wound up selling.

The poems, though—some of those had promise. So I tinkered with them and sort of brought them into shape, and not only have I been submitting them, I’ve been writing original work, and I’m excited about poetry for the first time in forever. We’ll see what comes of it.

One thing I’ve noticed about poetry submissions is that I have very little investment in whether the poems are accepted or understood. Some short story rejections still sting a bit—especially when I look at the sheer volume of submissions I’m putting out. Poetry, though, it doesn’t matter as much. I feel like the victory is in being able to produce and submit it at all.

What that brings me to is two things. One is, last night, I made my first submission of the new year—and it’s a poetry submission. If you told me 5 years ago that this would be the case, I’d never have believed you.