A couple of posts ago I wrote about my own relationship to poetry.  Now that I'm home and memories are canvassed around me, I decided my next couple of posts would be an appropriate forum to reflect upon how I arrived at my current fascination with poetry.  

First semester of my sophomore year in high school, I stumbled clumsily around the dark room trying to create something meaningful in black and white. Photography was fun. I enjoyed composing photos, but I felt an extreme disconnect between myself, my camera, and the ultimate image these wonder chemicals produced. I hesitate to say I quit, but I temporarily retired my Nikon and adopted pen and paper as I enrolled in creative writing, which I quickly became immersed in for the rest of high school.

My school’s creative writing curriculum rotated thematically every year, moving in cycles from play writing/screenwriting, to nonfiction, to fiction, to poetry. As I dove in second semester, day one I was assigned to write a poem. I came home eager to write, but immediately grew frustrated by the cursor aggressively flashing against the stark white of my word processor. Writing had always flowed from my fingertips, but suddenly with the challenge of poetry I was obsessively self-editing. No more than twelve characters made it onto the page before they were quickly erased with the staccato press of rapid backspacing. This was my first serious attempt at art that required no materials I did not already innately possess. Simultaneous feelings of horror and exhilaration arose knowing my finished product would not depend on film, paintbrushes, or popsicle sticks. My creativity was my only instrument, and I felt like mine was out of tune and missing some strings.

My first written, artistic attempt was okay – perhaps better in idea than execution. I wrote what I then thought to be an edgy list poem, “23 Last Suppers” chronicling the imaginary last suppers of the twenty-three prisoners executed the previous year under the Texas death penalty. My relationship to poetry had evolved past my three cherished volumes of Shel Silverstein, but still read like a greatest works anthology filled with William Carlos Williams’ apologies for eaten plums and Rupert Brooke’s nationalist fervor. Writing poetry taught me the tools I needed to be a more critical reader. At first, I seldom looked to professional examples, but I learned valuable lessons from the work of my peers. Familiar with a whole new vocabulary of techniques and styles – pantoum, slant rhyme, anaphora – my first significant opportunity to engage poetry came in my Spanish literature class. Reading Bécquer and Neruda, I realized the extent to which poems lend themselves to intellectual play in interpretation.  This tale is to be continued, but in the interim, I'll share the aforementioned poem:

Twenty-Three Last Suppers

God is good, God is great, and we thank
Him for this food we eat.
Food characterizes life…

A gallon of pistachio ice cream,
Plump and juicy hot dogs,
A deliciously roasted turkey leg,
Four greasy fried empanadas,
A savory sirloin steak,
Twelve jumbo Big Macs,
Thirty-two sticky vegetable dumplings,
A decadent chocolate cake,
Helpings of handmade spinach ravioli,
Rich cheese enchiladas and refried beans,
One box of Hostess Ding Dongs,
A pint of creamy New England clam chowder,
A scrumptious serving of chicken cordon bleu,
Eleven slices of pumpkin pie,
Exquisite prime rib,
Half a dozen freshly baked sesame bagels,
Sixty-four ounces of wiggly blueberry Jello,
Three bowls of sweet Lucky Charms,
Lamb chops with mashed potatoes,
A short stack of gingerbread pancakes,
An enormous Cesar salad,
One quiche Loraine,
Chicken nuggets and French fries.

…The glorified final meal characterizes death.
And now you lay me down to sleep. If I should die
before I wake, I pray to you my soul to keep.


Texas catered to the dining wishes of its twenty-three
citizens executed in 2004.
The Lone Star State single-handedly prepared an
overwhelming forty percent of all Last Suppers
for the entire country.