Week Seven: Guest Judge Sandra Beasley

Sandra Beasley is the author of I Was the Jukebox, winner of the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize, selected by Joy Harjo and forthcoming from W. W. Norton. Her first collection, Theories of Falling, won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize judged by Marie Howe. She lives in Washington, D.C., where she writes for the Washington Post Magazine and is working on Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, forthcoming from Crown. Click here to visit Sandra's blog!

How I Discovered Poetry: Sandra Beasley

How I Discovered Poetry ~ Sandra Beasley



On the final day of the Scholastic Book Fair, I walked into our school library with a packet of dollar bills folded over and crammed down into the mini-pocket of my imperfectly pegged, not-Guess-label bluejeans. You know, the front pocket inside the pocket--the one for super-important things. I had begged my mother for a little extra money. After The Baby-sitter's Club, after Encyclopedia Brown, after deciding I could check out the lavishly illustrated, hardcover Jane Yolen book from the library rather than needing to buy it, I had $1.50 left. I picked up Piping Down the Valleys Wild, a poetry anthology edited by Nancy Larrick. I chose it because I liked the soft- and pink-edged cover, of a lamb merrily springing along. I liked the fact that even if I only had time for a page or two, a page or two was enough.

Even now, Karla Kuskin's poem echoes in my head: "I'm a lean dog, / a mean dog / a wild dog / and lone...." I was a lone dog that year: too desperate to be liked, too in love with my own sadness. Books were my buffer. I read poetry on the school bus. I read poetry in my grandfather's garden, down by the unnameable purple flowers. I read poetry in my tent. I read poetry while eating artichokes one leaf at a time. I read poetry on the cold mornings in my house, standing over the air vent with my nightgown tucked under my feet, trapping all the hot air against my thighs before it could escape to the rest of the house. I read that book in bed until my eyes grew tired, and so I took turns shutting one eye, then the other. I read that book until my arms grew tired, and so I tied a length of string around the book's spine and scotch-taped it to hang down from the ceiling via a length of packing string. The book fell down and bonked me in the face right after I'd finally gotten settled again under the covers. Emily Dickinson, Vachel Lindsay, Sara Teasdale.

So often when we move forward in school and in life, we look back at our most-adored books with a twinge of embarrassment. We outgrow the things we loved. But I have I never had to disown the poets; they travel with me. They gather in number. I felt like a lone dog back in the day when all the other girls wore Guess jeans, and I couldn't afford them. But I'm part of a bigger pack now. We race. We dare the moon with our howling.

"Why Do I Write" ~ Sandra Beasley

WHY DO I WRITE ~ Sandra Beasley

It's not that I * have * to write. It's not a heavenly mandate: if I became aphasic tomorrow I would still find a meaningful life in my family, my city, the visual arts, bluegrass music. Hell, I can make a mean dirty martini and an elegant origami crane and some days, that's enough.

I choose to write. Moreover, it's a selfish choice. I write because (stealing from Henry Taylor here), I feel better after having finished a good draft than I do at any other time. I love getting lost in the flow of writing--forgetting about sleep, oblivious to a growling stomach or a blister on my heel--and just writing, writing, writing, for hours. And though I try to pursue poetry in peaceful spaces, outdoors or in my rocking chair, the reality is that the best writing renders your locale irrelevant. I can write happily on the metro or in a cruddy airport lounge. I have never, sadly, been allowed to mix a martini in a cruddy airport lounge. All one needs to write is a scrap napkin and a pen; or just a pen; or just the determination to remember a few phrases that form a poem's nucleus. It is an incredibly adaptable art, a mental refuge.

Writing is a way of entering the world. The best poems, to my eye, organize the tangible details of life in a way that renders meaning that the reader knew, but couldn't quite put a finger on. That doesn't mean that poems should exclude the absurd or surreal, but rather that the absurd and surreal should become vehicles for grounded, emotive or intellectual truths. If the writing doesn't create a truth, I'm not interested.