Little choices, and unexpected encounters can have big, life long, life changing consequences. When I was raised, my father only had a high school education, my mother dropped out of high school at age 17 because she was pregnant with me. They were two people from the same blackbelt fundamentalist church. My mother was a skilled craft artist, and my father was a wantabee opera singer and wantabee artist/illustrator. They started out with a strained economic situation.I was their first child, and was, in the early years, somewhat pampered. They read to me: the Bible, a pile of those Little Golden Books, Mother Goose poems, and A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. There were two of his poems that I liked and still remember today. The first, The Land of Counterpane, I have memorized the first stanza.
The Land of Counterpane
From A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson
When I was sick and lay a-bed,
I had two pillows at my head,
And all my toys beside me lay,
To keep me happy all the day.
And sometimes for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bed-clothes, through the hills;
And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down among the sheets;
Or brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.
I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant land of counterpane.
I also liked this short little gem:
Looking Forward
From A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson
When I am grown to man's estate
I shall be very proud and great,
And tell the other girls and boys
Not to meddle with my toys.
I don’t remember much exposure to poetry after that until I was 10 and my father painted a picture that he called, Stopping By Woods. I was an admirer of my father, afraid of him mostly, but still I was fascinated by the guy. If he liked painting then painting was what I wanted to do. When he gave this painting the title Stopping By Woods, I wanted to know where that title came from, and that was my first exposure to Robert Frost. I actually memorized Stopping By Woods then, and still would get about 90% of it right if asked to quote it today.
I really had little exposure, or interest in poetry after that, for the next five years. At age 15 my father decided to be a missionary to the lost souls in Milwaukee Wisconsin (he wanted to take the SIN out of WisconSIN), and we moved from Texas to Milwaukee. There was a medical doctor who was a mover and shaker at the 35th and Cherry Church of Christ, and after moving in the whole family was invited to the doctor’s home for supper.
Inviting our family to dinner was a big deal because there were 8 of us in the family, and a family of four inviting a family of eight meant you had to lay out a table and three card tables for 12 people. This dinner turned out to be life changing for me. Dr. Winship was the most educated man I’d ever met, and as we spread out in the Winship den I noticed some magazines on the coffee table. It was Atlantic Monthly. I’d never heard of the magazine, and since I was a kid, and older than all the other children there, I sat in a corner and flipped through the magazines. I was surprised to see that there were poems in the magazine.
I knew there were poetry books, but I don’t recall ever seeing a poem published in a magazine. I read them, and was shocked that they did not rhyme. They appeared to be written by people who were still living. I don’t recall a single poem, nor do I recall understanding the works, but I was drawn to the poems. I suddenly saw poetry as a means of gaining recognition. I didn’t think I had the discipline, or skill to write a short story, or a novel, but even a kid like me could write 8 or 10 lines of verse, especially if it didn’t have to rhyme.
I started writing poetry the next day, and I have been writing poetry now for 43 years. In high school I was a lousy poet, but I was also a determined poet. I wrote a lot. I shared what I wrote. I was not too bright, so I had no idea how poor a poet I was, and so I was not discouraged by my lack of talent.
My home was chaotic. We were too many people living in too small a space. The school and public libraries were places I could go and things were roomy and quiet. As long as you’re there you might as well flip through some books, and I found myself reading two main areas of literature: poetry and plays. I continued to try my hand at writing poetry and plays. (The choice of writing plays was odd because I don’t think I even saw a play until I was 16 years old.) The more I read poems, the more I read about the lives of the poets, and that lead me to read books about the way poems are constructed. It wasn’t long before my technical knowledge of the nuts and bolts of poetry construction exceeded that of the average high school English teacher.
I was pretty ignorant of everything else. I was horrible at spelling and grammar. I had zero math and science knowledge. Because my father was a little unstable and moved constantly I ended up attending 33 schools before I graduated from high school. This meant that I was always the new kid in school, and that I never had any long-term friendships. Add to that my lack of interest or ability in sports, and my constant writing in spiral notebooks, and reading books that no one else was reading, and you have a really weird guy.
I wrote so much that my senior year when the class voted on the superlatives: Most Popular, Most Likely to Succeed, I was elected Most Creative. I am certain I was not the Most Creative member of my senior class, but I thought of myself as creative, and when the students were asked to fill out their ballets, and they really had little interest in who was creative, they picked me, because they just didn’t give it much thought. Nevertheless, I was, in my own mind a poet, and creative.
I am the first member of my family to go to college and graduate, and when I had to pick a major I picked English, because that was the one that seemed to include poetry. I didn’t resist my own proneness to depression because poets are depressed. Poets like John Berryman, Hart Crane, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, Sara Teasdale, and later, Ann Sexton all killed themselves. Depression seemed a part of being a poet, and I had good reason to be depressed even without the poetry aspect. Add in my desire to be a real poet, and you have just taken away my motivation for fighting the depression. For a time I drank too much because Dylan Thomas drank himself to death, and he was a great poet, right?
This is stupid, of course. There is nothing that you can do while depressed or inebriated that you couldn’t do better if you were sober and unencumbered by hopelessness and despair.
Still, I write on, and on with very little reinforcement for my efforts. I self published a novel, and some religious books, and a book of poetry, and I don’t think anyone in my family has bothered to read any of them. In fact, almost all of the copies purchased were bought by me, given as gifts to people who politely said, “Thanks,” and then either shelved the books or tossed them. I am a writer with few readers, yet I continue to write. I don’t write sometimes. I don’t write often. I write daily. I write often. I read about writing. I sometimes fear I may have a mild form of Hypergraphia.
Bra Ads By tex norman
I stand before you
a man racked with guilt
and shame
that came
(or so I felt)
from my Calvinistic, blackbelt,
fundamentalist
father. He wasn’t much fun,
but he certainly was mental.
He could make a hard-shell Baptist
look like a godless ACLU liberal.
I also liked this short little gem:
Looking Forward
From A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson
When I am grown to man's estate
I shall be very proud and great,
And tell the other girls and boys
Not to meddle with my toys.
I don’t remember much exposure to poetry after that until I was 10 and my father painted a picture that he called, Stopping By Woods. I was an admirer of my father, afraid of him mostly, but still I was fascinated by the guy. If he liked painting then painting was what I wanted to do. When he gave this painting the title Stopping By Woods, I wanted to know where that title came from, and that was my first exposure to Robert Frost. I actually memorized Stopping By Woods then, and still would get about 90% of it right if asked to quote it today.
I really had little exposure, or interest in poetry after that, for the next five years. At age 15 my father decided to be a missionary to the lost souls in Milwaukee Wisconsin (he wanted to take the SIN out of WisconSIN), and we moved from Texas to Milwaukee. There was a medical doctor who was a mover and shaker at the 35th and Cherry Church of Christ, and after moving in the whole family was invited to the doctor’s home for supper.
Inviting our family to dinner was a big deal because there were 8 of us in the family, and a family of four inviting a family of eight meant you had to lay out a table and three card tables for 12 people. This dinner turned out to be life changing for me. Dr. Winship was the most educated man I’d ever met, and as we spread out in the Winship den I noticed some magazines on the coffee table. It was Atlantic Monthly. I’d never heard of the magazine, and since I was a kid, and older than all the other children there, I sat in a corner and flipped through the magazines. I was surprised to see that there were poems in the magazine.
I knew there were poetry books, but I don’t recall ever seeing a poem published in a magazine. I read them, and was shocked that they did not rhyme. They appeared to be written by people who were still living. I don’t recall a single poem, nor do I recall understanding the works, but I was drawn to the poems. I suddenly saw poetry as a means of gaining recognition. I didn’t think I had the discipline, or skill to write a short story, or a novel, but even a kid like me could write 8 or 10 lines of verse, especially if it didn’t have to rhyme.
I started writing poetry the next day, and I have been writing poetry now for 43 years. In high school I was a lousy poet, but I was also a determined poet. I wrote a lot. I shared what I wrote. I was not too bright, so I had no idea how poor a poet I was, and so I was not discouraged by my lack of talent.
My home was chaotic. We were too many people living in too small a space. The school and public libraries were places I could go and things were roomy and quiet. As long as you’re there you might as well flip through some books, and I found myself reading two main areas of literature: poetry and plays. I continued to try my hand at writing poetry and plays. (The choice of writing plays was odd because I don’t think I even saw a play until I was 16 years old.) The more I read poems, the more I read about the lives of the poets, and that lead me to read books about the way poems are constructed. It wasn’t long before my technical knowledge of the nuts and bolts of poetry construction exceeded that of the average high school English teacher.
I was pretty ignorant of everything else. I was horrible at spelling and grammar. I had zero math and science knowledge. Because my father was a little unstable and moved constantly I ended up attending 33 schools before I graduated from high school. This meant that I was always the new kid in school, and that I never had any long-term friendships. Add to that my lack of interest or ability in sports, and my constant writing in spiral notebooks, and reading books that no one else was reading, and you have a really weird guy.
I wrote so much that my senior year when the class voted on the superlatives: Most Popular, Most Likely to Succeed, I was elected Most Creative. I am certain I was not the Most Creative member of my senior class, but I thought of myself as creative, and when the students were asked to fill out their ballets, and they really had little interest in who was creative, they picked me, because they just didn’t give it much thought. Nevertheless, I was, in my own mind a poet, and creative.
I am the first member of my family to go to college and graduate, and when I had to pick a major I picked English, because that was the one that seemed to include poetry. I didn’t resist my own proneness to depression because poets are depressed. Poets like John Berryman, Hart Crane, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, Sara Teasdale, and later, Ann Sexton all killed themselves. Depression seemed a part of being a poet, and I had good reason to be depressed even without the poetry aspect. Add in my desire to be a real poet, and you have just taken away my motivation for fighting the depression. For a time I drank too much because Dylan Thomas drank himself to death, and he was a great poet, right?
This is stupid, of course. There is nothing that you can do while depressed or inebriated that you couldn’t do better if you were sober and unencumbered by hopelessness and despair.
Still, I write on, and on with very little reinforcement for my efforts. I self published a novel, and some religious books, and a book of poetry, and I don’t think anyone in my family has bothered to read any of them. In fact, almost all of the copies purchased were bought by me, given as gifts to people who politely said, “Thanks,” and then either shelved the books or tossed them. I am a writer with few readers, yet I continue to write. I don’t write sometimes. I don’t write often. I write daily. I write often. I read about writing. I sometimes fear I may have a mild form of Hypergraphia.
Bra Ads By tex norman
I stand before you
a man racked with guilt
and shame
that came
(or so I felt)
from my Calvinistic, blackbelt,
fundamentalist
father. He wasn’t much fun,
but he certainly was mental.
He could make a hard-shell Baptist
look like a godless ACLU liberal.
No lie.
So all my life I
have felt like a hopeless
and helplessly unworthy one
living in the State of SIN,
the black sheep of my family.
Despite, however, the
the religious oppression of my family
we did have porn in
our house. It was called
the Sears & Roebuck Catalogue,
containing seventeen provocative pages
of brassieres for all sizes and ages.
Back in 1950-twelve, I
perused those over (and under) developed bra models
modeling bra, after bra, after buh-buh-buh bra.
I could sit for hours imagining
their hoooo-haaahs.
Back then there was a poplar song
about an “itsy-bitz,
teeny-weenie-
yellow-polka-dot bikini”
that prompted Sears to add
three pages of two-piece
bra-topped swimming suits
added, I thought, just for me
adding to me variety.
Then, one day, all my fears
came true.
I got caught
while scrutinizing a brassiere
that hooked (oh, my god)
in the front. You know,
between the left hoooo and the right haaah.
My father saw what I was seeing.
There must’ve been like 57 hooo-haaahs
on each page
and I was of an age
my daddy thought too
young to
be forming such mummeries
so daddy worked himself into a
brew-ha-ha
like rage reciting scripture
about how impure
my thoughts were. He
threw scripture at me
like one of those onward Christian Soldiers
lobbing verse grenades.
“The Apostle Paul wrote
in his First Letter to the Corinthians
that, ‘it is good not to touch a woman.’”
When a guy says something like that
you can’t help but wonder,
“Had Paul ever tried it?”
Then my daddy quoted Jesus, who said,
“It is adultery to look at the bust
and to lust.”
Finally, my father bemoaned those cross your heart
Playtex living bra ads on TV.
But I have to say
it seemed to me
that those television bra ads were directed right at me.
Their very name was a Direct Address.
Listen carefully
I’m sure you’ll hear it:
“PLAYTEX”
...............“Play tex”
............................."Play tex!”
The Checker By tex norman
Standing on a rubber mat, she shifts
her weight from left to right, from foot to foot,
as if dancing, slowly, solo, in
one place. She shimmies to the scanner’s beep.
I watch her picking up my purchases,
and waving each across a laser’s beam.
It’s lift, and twist, and wave, then listen for
the beep that says the bar-code has been read.
She doesn’t have to think to calculate
the cost of living. All she has to do
is wave her hand, and, voila, things add up.
The change I’m due is read off of a screen.
“Hard day?”
I ask, though I already know
how difficult it is to do her job.
I use to do what she is doing now,
except, no mat, and registers back then
could calculate, but they did not compute.
“Yeah,”
she says,
“They all seem hard to me.
My feet are getting flat-er every day.
Flat-er, wide-er, sore-er every day.”
I could, but don’t explain why her feet hurt.
The weight of the world is pressing down on her.
The world is barely balanced on her back,
but if she doesn’t know about the Atlas
Curse, she isn’t going to learn of it
from me. She tells me what I owe,
I pay, she reads the screen and gives me change.
I wish she knew the joy of making change.
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