SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT WRITERS AND READERS, SPEAKERS AND LISTENERS

What’s big and red and eats rocks? Why, a big red rock-eater.

A thunder god went out to ride his favorite filly. “I’m Thor,” he cried. The horse replied, “you forgot your thaddle, thilly.”
Marvin leaned up along the outer wall of a big yellow house. A woman walked by and asked Marvin why he was leaning against the wall. Marvin said, “I’m holding the house up.” The woman said that was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard. “Go away, young man.” So Marvin walked away,

and the house fell down.

I am a writer and listener, and these are a sample of the stories my father read to me out of Boys’ Life, a Boy Scout monthly magazine sent to members. My Boy Scout brother thought it was stupid, so my dad and I took it over, and howled. I was five when we first started looking at it, and wasn’t writing yet, but I knew then that I wanted to. And as soon as I could write sentences, I started. And sometimes my father and I had writing “dates”: we’d sit at the kitchen table and write. I wrote goofy poems and stories; my father wrote cowboy ballads. And he was good; those dates were a blast.

Time passed. I learned to read all manner of books and reveled in the language and the world each book’s particular language created. But almost from the start, my true love was poetry, as it continues to be. But not all writers write poetry, or just poetry, and that’s true of me as well. And I think the urge to write comes early—even if it’s writing an annotated grocery list for your mother who doesn’t speak English easily—from the stories and poems we hear, and the conversations that go on around the supper table. Or the talk you hear among passengers on the city bus, or while waiting in line for a haircut at Foltos’s Tonsorial Parlor. You marvel at the beauty and power of words, and as much as I hate the word (subject for another blog), are inspired by what you can do with them. And even when you’re not actively writing, words and their worlds are knocking around in your head, even if you don’t know what you’re going to do with them, where they’re going to take you. Some people think writing is the easiest job in the world, but a writer, and the people who read them know that’s not true. It’s one of the hardest things you can do. You don’t know—most of the time—who’s going to read your work, and what, if anything, it’s going to do to them. I’m a member of the Academy of American Poets. I have a plastic card like a credit card, and when someone challenges me about being a poet, I answer back, jokingly (sort of), I have a license to write poetry, and I show them the card,

And that’s how writers and readers go: you start reading or being read to, and then, it you have the desire and need and inclination and talent, you start writing, early or late. What matters is that you do it, I’ve been writing seriously since high school, have written ten books (not all poetry) and my eleventh book of poems, Joy In the Journey: A Book of Dharma, is at the publisher’s. And writing that book, which took me two years to do while doing other things, too, was a joy. So I’ll leave you with one of its poems, which introduces the book’s second part:

Space is space, life
is life, everywhere
the same. Meditation
is meditation. The self

is true as selflessness;
dark as one with light:
how else would we recognize
one without the other?

Therein lies the truth. And
compassion, given for all and
and for one: there is no difference,

Yikes! Spike