A Vagabond’s Versed Vents

Stage Light, Stage Fright, First Stage To Set Me Right

Written word has always been a sanctuary for me.  Books gave me places to explore and dream about; they were my teachers in the world of emotion.  It seemed natural to me that feeling could only be properly expressed in writing.  I can’t really describe how I feel when my only tools are teeth and tongue.  In my family’s current state of upheaval even, I’m forced to write out my opinions, thoughts, and strong feelings on the happenings.  Even with more positive emotion, I find myself tongue-tied:  expressing joy or love, I can do no more but smile and gesture uselessly.  But, if given a pen and paper, my feelings flush out.

When a person is unable to express herself, a wall between the real world and the person world is built.  It becomes harder to communicate with others, easier to hide behind an apathetic facade.  Writing has proven a formidable sledgehammer, allowing me to break the walls, and express myself to not only those close to me, but also a larger audience. 

Like many introverted young people, I turned to poetry in high school.  Heavy-handed lines and single verse poems were my mainstay, but an influx of modern poetry into my wordly diet soon started a transformation.  Multiple stanzas were adopted, more metaphoric images, simpler word choice (a thesaurus does not a good writer make), and a maturity of thought created better poetry.  It became the only way I could properly convey any emotion.

By my junior year in high school I found the niche in the writing world I was meant to occupy.  Come hell and high waters, I knew poetry was going to be what sustained me.  Maybe it wasn’t going to be what fed me and kept a roof over my head, but I knew it was what I was going to do.

In my senior year, I took creative writing:  a laid back class of ten students taught by the young, tiny Mrs. Sands.  We didn’t read a lot of published work, but instead tirelessly work-shopped our own pieces.  “Change this line.  It makes everything unclear,” someone would shout across the circle of desks.  “No way,” the retaliation would be, “I think it clears it all up.  Keep it.”  It may not have been the most helpful, but buoyed by constant positive support, I felt my confidence in my writing, and my ability to express my feelings grow slowly.

In late January, our brand new English Honor Society decided to have a Winter Show to celebrate poetry.  A body could sign up to read his own poetry or to perform songs he  had written himself.  I didn’t want to participate.  It was one thing to read to our class—they were people who had allowed me to be as privy to their emotions as I was letting them to mine—but an audience?  Full of people I wouldn’t know?  Sure I wanted to publish one day, but I wouldn’t need to be in the same room as my readers.

“Do it,” Mrs. Sands coaxed.  “Even if they think you suck, they’ll clap!”  The class laughed; most of them were of the same opinion as me:  our poetry was not to meet an audience.  Or, at least, not by our own hands and mouths. 

Mrs. Sands harped for days.  After any good workshop she would declare in a loud, carefully offhand voice that “More people should hear this stuff,” and “Wow, this would be great for a…gosh, for a poetry reading!”  Some people bowed, others, myself included, refused.  Finally, she approached me after class and insisted I join the “fun”.  “You’ve got talent, respect that and sign up.  Or I’ll just put your name down and tell your dad.” With a wink and a nudge, she jaunted back to her tenth graders, leaving me mouth agape at her sudden and unexpected praise.  Enheartened, I decided a good ol’ “What the heck” and a surrendering shrug were in order.

The big night came too quickly, I felt.  Before I could blink, I was standing backstage trying not to panic.  Out of the thirty supposed participants, only seven had shown up:  three people from our class, three of our friends, and a freshman girl.  Suddenly, I was going to need to play a bigger role than I had anticipated.  We needed enough material to last about forty-five minutes.  That meant I was going to have to read several pieces, most of which were going to have to be from Mrs. Sands’ archival workshops.

With a sense of dread, I approached the microphone, my fingers making sweaty smears on my penciled poems.  I shyly nodded, dumbstruck for a moment under the harsh lights, but then concentrated on the words.  They floated off the paper like a shining epistle, and I was off.  Inflection, sly glances at the audience, terror-clear changes for the better, I had it all.  Finished with my first piece, I smiled to the clapping audience and stepped back, feeling cheered.  I had to race onstage again several more times during the night, receiving only approval from the crowd.  If it was all because they were just being nice, I didn’t care!  The clapping was serving its purpose in life and had me looking at my poetry, and, by extension, my own feelings with a more positive light.

Afterwards, when I was sitting on the stage with a friend, audience members actually came over to me and complimented my writing.  My friends told me there was a side of me they’d never seen.  I was surprised and delighted.  My goal of becoming a poet, once a nigh on unachievable one, started to look realistic.  Riding on a euphoria that comes when one who hungers after compliments gets a number of them, I started to enter a few poetry contests.  I won a few (earning myself a cool twenty bucks from the school, I might add), lost a few, got no response from a few, and generally began to work even harder on my poetry. My senior project morphed from having no structure to creating a chapbook to at least distribute to friends and family.  Later in the year, I started the Poem a Day activity for April (which is national poetry month).  My classmates and I would write a poem a day for the entire month and we workshop their favorites once a week. 

What really affected me most, though, was the talk my dad and I had after that night.  He was surprised to find threads of anger and resentment hiding under my usual indifferent behavior.  The talk we had that night at the kitchen table was one of the most rewarding in my life, and deeply changed our relationship. 

Since then I’ve used writing for many things.  It’s always been a passion of mine, a love, an awkward sort of affair, but it had less structure about it.  My poetry was good, I see no reason to try to pretend it wasn’t; but, in the moments after the reading, when the lights were dimming and I was realizing that I could use it like a careful instrument, a scalpel with which I could cut through my hard-shelled exterior and extract my more tender interior. I had been using it to that end for a few years, but I had not realized.  It became clear to me that without writing, I would be a heavily corked bottle of well shaken carbonated liquid, always trembling slightly, ready to pop.  Writing changed my life, maybe even, at the risk of sounding over dramatic, saved it