Older poem: "rain song"

rain song

a faint mur-mur over the othervoice rooms,

trickle driz tric murr

soft song of a nother-world

a world of trickle-drizzle sounds

a world far from drylit place

look through clear-glass shield confirms

trickle driz tric murr

coming down with steadybeat wurrs

softandwet beads up where smooth

few dare go past safeguard doors

look at sky – not much to see

trickle driz tric murr

an ocean of grays above me

patting on the tiles – driz purr

sing until the morning sun come

(3/15/1988)

I wrote this poem for my literature class in the 8th grade. I'd dabbled in poetry starting in the 7th grade, and I was very impressed with a few poets we were reading, like Emily Dickinson, e. e. cummings, and Robert Frost.

I can see some features in this poem that make it like a song, and relate to my style as an artist: parallel, almost strophic structure with a refrain tying the three stanzas together and creating a distinct rhythm; occasional use of rhyme, but not following a strict rhyme scheme; playful running together of words to create image-phrase neologisms ("othervoice", "nother-world", "drylit", etc.). It would be interesting to try to set to music.

To me this poem doesn't relate a lot of meaningful feeling or reflection, just some images and sounds of rain and being inside on a rainy night. I think if it is very significant to me at all now it is mainly because my teachers liked it quite a bit, and I felt very self-conscious to stand out like that. I saw myself as an artist, a poet, but felt very sad at the time because that was not really an identity I felt comfortable in. I really did not want to stand out. I wanted to fit in with my age peers and have lots of friends. Needless to say, adolescence is a challenging time. In my case, I remember how I struggled with a crisis of identity mainly centered on who was I going to try to please, my parents and teachers, or my peers. (At the time it did not occur at all that I could follow my own inner voice.) Just for personal interest, I continued to write an occasional poem through high school, but by about the 11th grade had mostly stopped my creative writing. Some time after college, when I was thrown upon the reality of not caring about the kind of work I'd set myself up for, I started exploring my creative interests again.