I should apologize for how long it took to publish even this one story in blog format. It would have gone quicker had I not tried to indent all the paragraphs. One of them is still not indented, but such are the ways of technology. The story will redeem itself. – Publisher.
THE WAY OF THE PEN, PART I
By Jamey Toner
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. – John 1:1
1: Sonnet
Beauty, wisdom, virtue, strength, and love—we call them gifts, but one way or another,
we end up having to account for them. I turned out to have a particular talent of my own, neither
flashy nor immediately practical, for which it would never have occurred to me to ask and which,
if I’d kept the receipt, I would probably have tried to return. Like everyone, I had given thought
over the years to my purpose and destiny; but as I was only a junior in high school, the question
hadn’t yet acquired much in the way of urgency. Once this “gift” business came to light,
however, the matter was suddenly all but taken out of my hands.
We came back from Christmas break as princes on the eve of coronation. Only one
semester, only one more summer, and then the rampaging ecstasy of seniordom was ours. I’d just
turned seventeen (my birthday’s on January first), and I was feeling especially wise and ancient
as I pulled into the parking lot that frosty morningtide. Emerging from my battered old Civic, I
stood with my fists on my hips and gazed proudly upon that training hall of sages and scholars to
be, St. John Vianney High. My regal moment lasted for approximately four seconds, and then
Sean showed up.
“Joey!” he bellowed, leaping out of the huge red pickup that we simply called, The
Vehicle. “We meet again, after all these long years!”
In reality, we’d spent the previous day together playing video games; but rational
responses only encouraged Sean’s absurdity. (Irrational responses, total non-responsiveness, and
radical physical violence encouraged him, too.) So I went for the unexpected approach: I
snatched my bag and took off toward St. J at a dead sprint with Sean ululating at my heels. He
was a big guy—especially compared to my scrawny ass—but I was just a hair faster. We zipped
through the halls, narrowly avoiding a lethal collision with Sister Thérèse, severed a Gordian
knot of freshmen clustered around their goony yellow freshman lockers, and almost literally flew
down the stairs to Mrs. Talleyrand’s homeroom. Bursting through the door, we found her
standing perfectly still in the empty room, and skidded to a halt, panting. Somehow she always
managed to convey the impression that if one had entered a moment sooner, he would have
caught her levitating.
“Hello, boys,” she said calmly. “How was your vacation?”
“Jovian, ma’am,” I said, still breathing hard, and headed for my desk. Sean in his
oafishness had forgotten his books and had to head back out to The Vehicle—not that it mattered,
as we were over ten minutes early. Soon our fellow juniors began to arrive, and we sat chattering
until Fr. Brown came over the PA to lead us in the Our Father and the Pledge of Allegiance.
My day started with European History (at present we were learning something about a
monarchy of some kind), and continued with Pre-Trig. Then there was a ten-minute break during
which I consumed more coffee than was entirely healthy, and then came AP English. Sean was in
this one, too, and he had developed the infectious habit of referring to our teacher, Mr. Mark
Roland, as Commander Mark. The Commander commenced with polite inquiries about our
holiday, and duly received the customary vague mumbles in reply.
“Good, good,” he said. “Then I trust your minds are well-rested and prepared for today’s
assignment.” I leaned forward, interested. Roland came up with some pretty challenging stuff
sometimes. “Today you will work in assigned pairs to create an original sonnet in the style of one
or more of the poets we have studied so far. However! You will not work together in the ordinary
sense: rather, you will alternate, one of you writing all the odd-numbered lines and the other
writing all the evens. You may consult, of course, but the point of this exercise is to inculcate
adaptability to the unforeseen, so don’t cheat yourselves. I want at least a rough draft by the end
of class, and please observe the forms of the sonnet—fourteen rhymed lines in iambic
pentameter; the octave sets forth a problem and the sestet proposes an answer. I would hate to
have to flunk any of you for handing in a haiku.”
The teachers at St. J knew better by now than to put me and Sean together, but I was
disheartened at the Commander’s choice of a partner for me: Sylvia Templeton, a slim, dark-
eyed girl, very pretty, but more than a little—well—I believe “tempestuous” is the currently
accepted nomenclature. She was the editor-in-chief of the Augury, our school’s monthly literary
magazine. Last semester, we’d all had to compose an original poem and read it aloud to the class.
Sylvia had been so impressed with my work that she’d been badgering me for weeks to submit a
few poems to the lit mag, and even the Commander had encouraged me to do so; but I had
steadily refused. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life, but I certainly had no desire to
be a poet. Everyone knew that the cosmos twirled its celestial mustache inventing horrific
tragedies for all poets.
She gave me half a smile and said, “Shall I start?”
I hesitated. I was in a good mood and wanted to write a happy poem; but I remembered
that she was partial to the gloomier fellows like Hardy and Housman, and I really didn’t feel that
was the correct note on which to begin. “How about rock-paper-scissors?” She shrugged and
held out her fist, and we counted to three and fired.
Luck was with me: she threw scissors to my rock. “All right, take it away.”
I figured I’d kick things off with a little Shakespeare. Can’t go wrong with Shakespeare.
Editing slightly for metrical purposes, I wrote, O what a piece of wondrous work’s a man!
Sylvia didn’t miss a beat. But Lord, what arrant fools these mortals be.
“Hey—we’re supposed to be on the same side here.”
“I don’t remember anyone saying that.”
I realized, with a slight frown, that she was technically correct. But surely the
Commander wouldn’t simply turn us loose on each other for his own demented amusement—?
My frown deepened. “Look, I won the coin toss. I want to construct a paean.”
“Doesn’t mean I have to be your peon.”
Sean turned around in his seat and stage-whispered, “Swish!”
“Sweet holy mercy, Sylvia, how do you live with yourself?”
“A girl could wait a lifetime for another pun like that. Anyway, it’s your serve.”
“Stop it, the both of you. I said ‘coin toss’—we’re doing a football metaphor right now.
In fact, Sean, you stay out of this altogether.”
“You got it, buddy. Have a good at-bat.”
I muttered something about the swift wings of death and returned to our—or, at any rate,
my—little ode. Before proceeding, I would have to settle on a rhyme scheme: ABAB or ABBA.
Pondering possible assonances, I stumbled into an innocent-seeming line: Stranger than dreamt
in our philosophy.
My esteemed opponent considered that for a few moments and then added, And oh, how
sharper than a serpent’s fang.
This wasn’t going so well; clearly, it was time to dial up the optimism. Yet God is in His
Heaven, all is right, I scrawled.
She scowled. “You’re using Browning’s defense against me, eh?”
“I thought it fitting, considering the rocky quatrain.”
“Naturally. You must expect me to attack with Christopher Marlowe.”
“Naturally—but I find that Milton cancels out Christopher Marlowe. Don’t you?”
“Unless the enemy has studied Matthew Arnold—” she made a few deft pen-strokes
“—which I have.”
My Browning assault reference was now followed by this:
Fall on us, hills, and hide us from His eyes!
We will not reign below but serve on high
Where ignorant angel armies clash by night.
I sighed. Our sonnet was going to end up looking like the work of a serial plagiarist with
a split personality.
“All right, little Miss Anthropy. Exactly what problem have we just set forth in our
octave?”
Sylvia quickly scanned our work-in-progress and raised her eyebrows. “I think we’ve
confronted the fundamental struggle between light and darkness in the human soul.”
“Oh, good. I’ve been meaning to clear that up anyway.”
“Have at it, stud.”
“I suppose you’ll come down on the side of darkness?”
“The universe comes down on the side of darkness, Joey. Have you looked at it lately?”
“I’m looking at it as we speak. I see a room full of safe, well-fed people learning stuff
about poetry. Ghastly enough, I’ll grant you, but still—”
“The sugar-coating topping on the abyss.”
“Boy, you’re a drop of golden sun.”
“And you’re a thread without a needle. Do the next line already.”
“Fine. Jeez.”
I bent over the paper again, and clicked my pen a few times. Maybe I could still creep to
some kind of acceptable middle ground. I down-shifted from Milton to Pope and wrote
hopefully, To stray is human, to return divine.
Sylvia rolled her eyes and made the precarious Pope-to-Poe transition: But we’re neither
god nor human—we are ghouls. “So much for papal infallibility.”
“Funny.”
Plainly, there would be no compromise here: this match was to the death. It suddenly
occurred to me that the obvious rhyme for her was fools—as in, “Lord, what fools these mortals
be”—and that, since the final line of the poem would be hers, she could thus bring the whole
thing full circle and render my opening line superfluous. The prospects were looking bright for
the pessimistic outlook. I had two moves left; if there were to be any hope, I would have to lure
out her king prematurely. Gambling all upon my guess at her fools-based end-game, I reverted to
the Bard and made my queen-sacrifice. Forever out of joint with Heav’nly time. I was all in now;
if this didn’t work, the voice of optimism would appear to have defected and the poem’s
bleakness would be complete. Maintaining a careful poker face, I awaited her penultimate play.
She pounced at the bait. The Hamlet-to-Midsummer bridge was already in place, and she
followed it home like a bloodhound. What weak and aimless mortals be these fools!
“Nicely put,” I said, smiling.
“Forfeiting?”
“Nope.” And then, rather smugly, I dropped it on her. Yet, poetry still blossoms from the
slime.
“What? Who the hell said that?”
“Joseph Ambrose Hopkins,” I answered proudly—and, folks, that was my ultimate
mistake. Like Odysseus and the Cyclops, I betrayed myself through hubris to my foe. Couldn’t I
have just said Keats or Wordsworth or something? But nay, in that moment I named myself
irrevocably as poet, and from thence arose all that was to follow.
Sylvia sat glaring at me for a long, silent moment; and then, abruptly, her smile re-
surfaced. “Okay. Then let’s wrap this up with an original piece by S.B. Templeton.” She raised
her pen and deliberated. I had time to project a few likely scenarios for our closing line—My
partner doesn’t seem to follow rules, or maybe, Apparently no justice at this school—but I was
startled by what she actually wrote. Thus every dragon’s dungeon hides its jewels.
Before I could frame a response, she raised her hand and said, “Mr. Roland! We’re done
here.”
He looked up, surprised. Barely ten minutes had gone by; everyone else was still in their
initial quatrains. “Are you sure? You’ve got plenty of time to edit; if you hand it in now, it’s
final.”
“Oh, I’m counting on it,” she said, getting up, and the smile was definitely a smirk now.
Quickly, as if she expected me to tackle her in the aisle, she loped over to his desk and handed
him our sonnet. “We’re calling it, ‘The Soul,’” she added, like a haggler upping his price in the
middle of the sealing handshake. The Commander nodded, murmured to himself, and jotted
something at the top of the paper—presumably, Soul, Templeton, Hopkins, or some such. The
poem, in its full bizareness, now read:
O what a piece of wondrous work’s a man—
But Lord, what arrant fools these mortals be!
Stranger than dreamt in our philosophy,
And oh, how sharper than a serpent’s fang.
Yet God is in His Heaven, all is right;
Fall on us, hills, and hide us from His eyes!
We will not reign below but serve on high
Where ignorant angel armies clash by night.
To stray is human, to return divine,
But we’re neither god nor human—we are ghouls,
Forever out of joint with Heav’nly time:
What weak and aimless mortals be these fools!
Yet, poetry still blossoms from the slime—
Thus every dragon’s dungeon hides its jewels.
“What was that all about?” I asked as she sat back down.
“Oh, nothing,” she said breezily, and pulled out her Calculus book.
I chalked up her behavior to an attempt at losing with good grace and shrugged it off,
turning cheerfully to the task of distracting Sean from his assignment for the rest of the class. I
had Roland for third period; by the end of fourth, I’d forgotten all about Sylvia, sonnets, and
“The Soul.” However—and I expect you’ve already seen this coming—she and Commander
Mark found me in the hall towards the end of lunch, and her smirk had returned like a self-
regenerating swamp creature that no mortal weapon could destroy.
Sean and I were arguing heatedly over who would win a Scrabble game between Paul
Bunyan and Gilgamesh (I can’t remember which side he took, but it was clearly ludicrous). I had
just embarked on a series of decidedly ungentlemanly observations about my friend’s parentage
and personal habits when the Commander approached and said, “Gentlemen.” We straightened
and greeted him with courteous words. “Ms. Templeton would like a moment.”
“Joey,” she said briskly. “Our next issue is due in three weeks. I’ll need to see you in Mrs.
Hennessey’s room right after sixth period. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
“What?”
“The Augury, Mr. Hopkins,” the Commander enthused. “In today’s assignment, you
quoted yourself—thereby staking your claim to poethood in the ranks of Shakespeare, Browning,
and the rest. Unlike Ms. Templeton, you have never voluntarily offered your work to the public
eye, which made me question the validity of your claim; but she has convinced me to let you
justify it, as it were, retroactively.”
“You’re now our staff poet,” said she. “Congratulations.”
“I—but, but—but I. . .” I glowered. “You two planned this from the start!”
Sylvia scoffed, but the Commander merely assumed a mien of injured innocence.
My new editor-in-chief punched me on the shoulder. “Welcome aboard, Hopkins. Let’s
see what blossoms from your slime.”
With that, they walked away and left me to survey the smoldering wreckage of my leisure
time. “Damn, dude,” Sean said gravely. “You got served.”
2: Augury
And that’s the mysterious cursed gift to which I referred at the outset: nothing awesome like
dark-elven blood or lycanthropy—just a poet’s tongue,apparently. But as it turned out, that was
more than enough to keep me in trouble.
After lunch I had Biology for fifth period, Music Theory for sixth, and that was it for the
day—or, at any rate, it used to be. Today, with my teeth grimly set and my pen and notebook in
hand like a lance and buckler, I trod the shadowed halls to Room 114. There sat Sylvia among
her notes, a spider-queen brooding and grumbling over dusty bones. “Joey,” she said, without
looking up, as I entered. “You’re right on time. Have a seat.”
Mrs. Hennessey taught math in its various forms (I had her for second period).
The Augury kept its headquarters in her room—rather than, say, Commander Mark’s—solely
because she had the biggest blackboards, and Sylvia liked to construct sprawling elucidations of
each prospective issue as it took shape through the editorial process. Our hostess smiled at me as
I sat down and said, “Hello, Joey. I’m glad to see you’re getting involved in the magazine.”
“Yes, ma’am. Sylvia batted her eyes at me until I capitulated.”
“She can be charming.”
“No, I mean winged rodents literally came flying out of her sockets. It was horrible.”
“Joey, for goodness’ sake,” Mrs. Hennessey reproved, failing utterly to keep a straight
face.
The lady in question ignored this whole exchange. “Maven—where do we stand on the
Shandy interview?”
“I finally got an appointment, but it’s not till the twenty-third. It’ll have to go in the
February issue.” Maven Rothschild was a fair-haired lass with a sunny smile, who was trying to
wrangle an interview with our town’s newly elected mayor. Had I been a mayor, I would have
canceled some fairly hefty appointments for the chance to talk with her; but then, that was
precisely why I would never be a mayor.
Our illustrious leader nodded and rifled through some notes. “That’s fine. We’ll run your
article on the Jesuits in the meantime. Tommy?”
Tommy Gorham wrote bizarre short stories, perhaps better called vignettes, featuring
elaborately normal protagonists who found themselves beset by drunken minotaurs or angry
asphalt golems. He had bright orange hair so violently untidy that he always appeared to have
escaped from the electric chair just minutes earlier. “New story’s comin’ along good! Touching
tale of a man whose toilet unexpectedly achieves total sentience.”
“That’s profoundly grotesque, my friend,” I said approvingly.
“Thanks, man.”
Sylvia accepted this without comment. Tommy’s yarns were consistently popular with the
student body, and there was no arguing with the bottom line. “Where’s Lily?”
Maven glanced at the door. “Dunno. I think she was arguing with her boyfriend about
something. She’ll probably be along in a few minutes.”
“This’ll be their fourth break-up. I just hope she can channel the angst.” Lily Hart was a
very talented photographer, for whose personal travails her editor showed little sympathy. In
justice to Sylvia, Lily did harbor a penchant for the melodramatic.
“All right, Joey—let’s talk poetry. What’ve you got?”
“Well, I naturally spent the last two periods composing a national epic of no fewer than
five hundred stanzas. The real question is whether it will fit in this little rag of yours.”
“Of ours, Hopkins. If you don’t have any pre-existing work to contribute, you’ll just have
to write something new. What do you propose to write about?”
“Isn’t it your job to tell me that?”
“My job is to make sure your submissions are ready to meet the public eye. Your job is to
rummage through the rainbows and lollipops in your skull and find something that moves you
enough to inspire verse. If Williams could drag a poem out of a red wheelbarrow, I’m sure you
can find something worth a few lines.”
“So you are prepared to admit that poetry can be valid even if it’s not calculated to make
its readers fling themselves into the nearest convenient fiery crevasse?”
“I’d rather not publish fluff, but I’m prepared to tolerate froth.”
I was about to unleash a rejoinder which I can’t exactly recall but which I know to have
been devastating, when the door of the classroom opened. We all turned, expecting to see Lily in
some manner of histrionic state; but instead, two seniors walked in with an air of ownership that
Sylvia and I regarded with envy and Tommy, a sophomore, with muted awe. Maven was a senior
herself, and paid scant heed.
I knew these two from of old. Steven Graveling and Peter Zahn by name, they were
physics wizards who had flourished in this strange new world in which Hollywood had made
comic books cool and the geeks of the land held their heads up high. We should have been allies,
comrades-in-arms; but Steve and Pete didn’t seem to feel that way.
“Oh,” Graveling said as he saw us at our table. “I forgot they were in here.”
“Every Monday for the last four months,” Sylvia told him, adding diplomatically, “if you
can count that high.”
“Having fun with our bird entrails, are we?” Zahn asked.
Instantly, I found my loyalties shifting. Five seconds ago, the Augury had been a prison to
me, a Bastille; but the moment it came under alien attack, it became a bastion, and my family
crest flew above the parapets. “Hey—Sturm and Drang. Has it occurred to either of you that
every single term you use in physics is a hundred percent metaphorical? That without the poetic
instinct you couldn’t even think coherently about your ideas, let alone communicate them to
anyone?”
Graveling furrowed his brow, but Zahn retorted immediately, “That’s not true!”
“Seriously? That’s what you’re going with for a comeback—‘nuh-uh’? Ask Mrs.
Hennessey, if you don’t believe me.” I jerked a thumb towards her desk, where she was grading
papers with Olympian detachment.
“Forget it,” Graveling said irascibly. “Let’s just go to the computer lab.”
They departed therewith; but I sensed the incipiency of antagonism to come. After the
door closed behind them, there was silence in the room for a few moments, and then Sylvia met
my gaze with an infinitesimal increase in warmth. “So—any chance you can have a draft of
something by next Monday?”
“I’m on it.”
*
Noelle was in my room when I got home. My little sister, and only sibling, was four years
my junior and was at this time in her final semester at St. Francis K-8, across town from St. J.
She was looking forward to our being schoolmates the next year, and—although I carefully
concealed the fact—so was I. Slight-framed and sharp-eyed, Noelle was the kind of person who
brightened a room by her presence even when she was actively trying to be unpleasant. “Hello,
knave,” she said cheerily as I entered.
“Hello, harridan. How’s your first day back?”
“Easy. I can’t wait for high school. I crave new conquests.”
“That would be creepy even if it weren’t coming from a thirteen-year-old girl.
Incidentally, have we discussed the reason you’re in my room right now?”
She made a face. “My computer’s acting up again.”
“You downloaded another virus, didn’t you?”
“Not. . . necessarily. It might be. . . more like a tape-worm.”
“I’ll have Sean fix it the next time he comes over. In the meantime you’ll have to make
do with mere books, like some naked Paleolithic savage. I need my work space.”
“Why, did they suddenly realize you haven’t done a homework assignment in the last
eleven years?”
“It’s not homework, it’s—” I paused, then sighed. “I kind of got shanghaied into writing
for the Augury.”
“By that Sylvia girl you told me about?”
“Her and Commander Mark.”
“Ooh, bad combo.” Noelle had yet to meet the Commander in person, but she’d been
very impressed by my tales and had high expectations for his classes. Frankly, he was going to
have to work to keep up with her.
“Yep. Now amscray. I gots to do me some poetizin’.”
“Whatcha gonna write about?”
“The thousand uses I have for your corpse.”
She stuck out her tongue and scuttled for the door. I closed it firmly behind her, turned
out the lights, drew my curtains, and settled down in the primeval darkness which precedes
creation. What was I going to write about? I’d always been subject to fits of creativity—drawing
cartoons, making up jingles, writing little stories and poems—but they came and went at will,
like lightning. The idea of attempting to harness such energies was new to me. Also, unlike the
ravings of the Muse, it sounded rather like work.
I sat motionless for a while in a semi-meditative state, vaguely hoping that something
professional-sounding would simply appear in my brain. When this failed to occur, I started
browsing through possible topics in my head: love, war, faith, mortality, pancakes. . . Nothing
came of this either. I turned on some Bach and spent the next half hour or so flipping through
random books on my shelf. A few phrases and images seemed resonant, and I kept them
simmering in the back of my head; but none of them yielded inspiration to my prodding. Finally
I rose and began to pace.
Sometime around five, our mom called us to dinner. I cursed my empty notebook and
acquiesced with resignation. The thought tends to linger that if one had only five more minutes,
the heavens would have opened wide; but on the other hand, the occasional break is probably
healthy, and I was feeling peckish. Also, one didn’t trifle with Ma Hopkins at feeding time.
Dad had just gotten home. My parents were both teachers, but Dad taught college and
Mom high school, so in the old days she would usually get home first and fix us all dinner.
Occasionally Noelle and I tried to help, but we lacked the knack. When Mom went off to visit
friends or family out of state from time to time, we mainly subsisted on take-out. I suppose it was
a more or less typical domestic arrangement in that regard.
Hearty was the provender that night: Mom cooked a fettuccini alfredo such as might
honor the table of an earl. We said grace and chatted a bit, but most of the table-talk consisted of
munching and ravening noises until we all reached our second or third helping. At last we leaned
back and conversed a bit more composedly, and the topic of my indenturing arose.
“I suspect this will be extremely good for you,” said Dad. “You need to learn to apply
yourself to things you don’t want to do, from time to time.”
“But writing’s supposed to be fun.”
“Nothing’s fun unless you take the effort to get good at it; even those imbecilic video
games of yours.”
Dad was always right, and it pissed me off.
“So, is Sylvia pretty?” Mom asked, inevitably.
“The human host in whom she’s taken up residence is easy on the eyes, but I believe
Sylvia herself to be an insectile alien parasite.”
Noelle giggled; Mom scolded me. Dad said nothing and looked leonine. Delicately, I
turned the discussion toward Paul Robeson High, where Mom taught English, and we all
deplored the state of American letters for a while. “Honestly, I think everyone should have to
contribute to a school paper of some kind, at least once or twice a year,” Mom ruminated.
“Well,” Noelle said, “once Sylvia’s brain-eating insect species takes over the planet—”
I burst out laughing, and our mother thundered anathemas. Dad rose to signal the onset of
dessert, and returned to the table laden with ice cream and a tray of fudge, caramel, whipped
cream, and various tropical fruits. All told, it was a good night’s supper. Soon after, I returned to
my room and devoted about twenty minutes to my actual homework, then focused my powers
once more upon the problem of poetry.
This time I decided to try forcing the issue. I sat at my desk, set pen to paper, and just
wrote things. In a couple of hours, I filled five pages with abortive doggerel. I shot a goose
hypotenuse. Walking down through Belgium town. Drink a drink and pee in sink. I tried to be
deep. Wisdom blossoms in the rain of old uncertainty and pain. I tried to be prophetic. In sixteen
hundred years, the moon will disappear. I switched gears and tried thinking up a catchy title.
“One Day at the Fair.” “The Sorrows of Werther’s Original.” “Beethoven’s Tenth.” Finally, I just
started spelling out words. Adjudicate. Quotidian. Narcolepsy. Then I picked up my head off the
desk, brushed my teeth, and went to sleep.
And when I woke up the next morning, I was glowing. It didn’t even come in a dream: it
was simply there, from nothing at all. A single line—or wait, no, two lines. They went, I
wandered long and wandered far / Before I washed up on the bar, / A lowly, lonely, lorn Jack Tar
/ Upon the wand’ring waves. I had no idea what it meant, but it seemed to be a scrap of a sea-
farer’s tale, probably one who got lost on the ocean like the Ancient Mariner. Except the rhyme
scheme appeared to be set up more like “The Raven.” What rhymed with “waves”? Saves,
graves. . . paves, maybe, but nobody paves anything at sea, that’s the whole point, there’s no
roads, you just go where the sea takes you. What was this guy’s name? Or, no—better keep him
nameless, at once mysterious and universal. “Graves” made the most sense—something
something all my comrades met their graves, or found their graves, or all my friends had found
their graves—depending on what verb tense we ended up with. What was the name of the ship?
Something cool, but not unrealistically cool—something like the, the Wave Treader, or
the Phantom—or—the Phantom Treader—no, that didn’t make any sense—
I almost literally found myself at school an hour later, as if I had teleported there. I must
have eaten,dressed, and driven, but all I remembered was the tiny, radiating sapphire in my mind.
I ghost-walked through first and second periods, rough-housing with phrase and image while the
world around me went its timeless round, watering my shining little poem-seed with the molten
gold of all that I had learned. I was in love with this thing. It was half a stanza long and it was
already the best thing I’d ever written. (In fact, I hadn’t even written anything yet, on paper; I
just kept the lines rolling on the back of my tongue. I could as easily have forgotten my own
name.) By the end of Pre-Trig, I had worked up a full stanza and a rudimentary plot. I’d also
realized that my initial lines were actually the very end of the poem.
As I was walking out of 114, I bumped into Steve Graveling. “Watch where you’re
going,” he snapped.
“You watch where I’m going. I don’t calculate trajectories.”
“Not successfully, anyway. You know, people like you would starve in the jungle if there
weren’t someone around to invent engineering and agriculture.”
“And people like you would starve if there weren’t someone to inspire the people who do
the actual work. I’ve never been on a farm, but I’m guessing they don’t keep their spirits up by
singing propositions of Euclid all day.”
Graveling took a step closer. “My grandfather was a farmer, Hopkins.”
“Good. You may not have grasped my point, but I was comparing both of us unfavorably
to any average laborer.”
It sank in, and his expression changed a little. “Oh. Well—good, then.” Further rejoinders
failed us, and he strode off down the hall; but I had a moment in which to reflect that I was
beginning to like this guy.
Then Sean came along, and all coherent thought ended. “Hopkins-san!” he shouted. “Let
us drink tea and commit seppuku!”
“I’m a coffee man, heavy cream and sugar, and hold the hara-kiri.” With eight precious
minutes of break remaining to us, we headed for the cafeteria.
“Hey, so, what happened with the lit mag yesterday?”
“Actually, it might end up being pretty cool. I’ve got this idea for a poem, and—man—I
haven’t been this excited about writing anything for a long time. Maybe ever.”
“Huh. I can’t help wondering which part of your body Sylvia snipped off to make her
voodoo doll.”
“I’m serious.” I started dumping sugar into my coffee. “This whole ‘staff poet’ gig may
just work out after all.”
“Are you gonna want some coffee in that morass of sweeteners?”
I slurped placidly. “Nope.”
“Anyway, keep rockin’ the poetry, by all means. Just don’t let psycho-lady push you
around.”
“Aw, she’s not so bad.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Don’t even start. She’s not my type.”
“You don’t have a type. You’ve never dated.”
“Unless you count my torrid affair with your mom.”
“Oops—you’ve just uttered my activation phrase.” He set down his tea and started
leaping from table to table, shrieking, “The Red-coats are coming! The Red-coats are coming!” I
pitched in by singing, “Rule, Britannia” at the top of my lungs until the lunch-ladies shooed us
away.
Thereupon, we ventured forth to the mystical realm of Commander Mark. I don’t
remember what we did in his class that morning, although it must have been awesome because it
was Commander Mark; my only memory is of the deepening and ramifying poem. By this time it
had a title, “Jack Tar’s Woe,” and I knew exactly how many stanzas it was to contain and
(roughly) what task each stanza must accomplish. Perfect little word-combinations were coming
to me in spurts, but I still had to carve a path through the chaos of the unsaid before they could
be maneuvered; and then I had to haul them, like the blocks of the Giza pyramids, into place. It
was an incredibly intense exertion, and by lunchtime (which flickered by unnoticed) I was
physically weary with it. Yet it was also a sacred and luminous joy.
At day’s end, I went straight home and smashed through my homework, then cracked
open a Dr. Pepper, found some chips, and unwound with some mindless video games until
suppertime. After the meal, I shut my door and wheeled the cosmos into my work-place.
Everything was now set. All that remained was the composing of a few key lines which I had
bracketed off with, “expl. about eels” or “insert soliloquy here.” Dr. Frankenstein was I, sewing
together the pieces and awaiting the thunderbolt.
It was well past midnight when I finished. Too fatigued to edit or even proof-read, I
flopped into bed with my clothes still on. At least I knew what I’d be wearing tomorrow.
Tomorrow came, and it was a more relaxed day now that the fever of the forge had faded;
but the glow remained. I spent that evening and the next tinkering with the finish, and
pronounced “JT’s Woe” complete late Thursday night. Sean and I spent our weekend reading the
classics and building orphanages—okay, no, we spent it blowing up digital zombies. On Monday
afternoon, I returned to Mrs. Hennessey’s room for the weekly conclave.
To her credit, Sylvia had not badgered me about my work since the last meeting. As we
gathered today, she consulted calmly with each of the others in turn. Lily was there this time, and
had some good photos to contribute. Tommy had most of his story written, Maven had already
submitted the article we were going to run in this issue, and there were a couple of free-lancers
present who occasionally gave us pieces as well. Nick, another sophomore, was on cover design
duty and reported that the work was progressing apace. Once everyone else had spoken, Sylvia
turned to me. “All right, Hopkins. As this will be your first issue with us, I hope you’ve got
something impressive to bring you out of the gate.”
I smiled modestly and handed her a single type-written sheet. She took it with impassive
mien and glanced through the first few lines; then she set it down and hunched over it for a
minute or two while the room sat quiet. At length her face rose again, and it wore an actual
smile. “Wow, Joey. This is fantastic. I’m impressed.”
“Thanks.”
There was a clamor of “lemme see’s,” and Sylvia handed the sheet to Maven. “I don’t
know why you fought this for so long. You’ve obviously got a gift.”
“It was really hard, Sylvia.”
“It’ll get easier. I expect something as good or better, next month.”
“Well, dude,” Tommy said with a big grin, “it looks like you’ve been—inaugurated!”
Then he flung back his head and wailed with laughter.
I grinned back at him. “Bring on the entrails.”
3: Training
She was right; it did get easier. Over the next few weeks, I produced several quite
creditable little works (though I say it who shouldn’t). We ran one of my humorous pieces in the
February issue, and it turned out to be extremely popular with our schoolfellows. Then in March
I did another serious one, and I started getting compliments in the halls.
Interestingly, one of the nicest remarks—or, at any rate, one of the most gratifying—came
from my physicist foemen. The March poem contained a couplet about the cosmic order: The
universal mathematic, leavened / By holy unheard harmonies of Heaven. The theme was that the
world was a kind of symphony, with every soul playing a variation on the divine leitmotif. Not a
ground-breaking idea, but nonetheless worth saying for having been said before. A few days
after that month’s issue came out, Graveling and Zahn passed me in the cafeteria and the latter
turned on me abruptly and said, “Hey, Hopkins—you’re almost making sense.”
“Quite well, thanks for asking. And how are you today?”
“He’s talking about that poem you did,” Graveling supplied. “It sounded like you were
saying that the universe was based on mathematics, but we figured we might be reading too
much logic into it.”
I shrugged. “Math is music in numbers; poetry’s music in words. I hate to say it, boys,
but we are in fact on the same side.”
Zahn looked unhappy about it, but Graveling came close to cracking a smile. “Only
because you’re a tiny bit less dumb than you come across.”
“Don’t say that too loud. My editor will start tapping you for blurbs.”
By early April, I was feeling really good about the whole poet thing—even developing a
suspicion that my path in life might just involve rhyme and meter after all. That was when I
smashed head-on into my first major failure.
Easter was late that year. The Augury’s next issue was due out almost as soon as we came
back from the break, and I thought it would be nice to write a poem about the holy day. I came
home on Friday with a whole week of Easter vacation ahead of me, filled with plans for cranking
out epic poetry and defeating the pixilated monstrosities that had kidnapped the princess yet
again. I spent the evening poring over a blank sheet, scribbling the occasional line and scribbling
it back out; but that didn’t concern me, as I had discovered that my best work often bloomed
from such unpromising soil. The next morning I read a bunch of poetry in the hopes of priming
the pumps, then took another stab at writing something—still to no avail. I decided my faculties
must be fatigued after mid-terms, and resolved to depart from the literary sphere altogether until
Monday.
So, I cruised on over to the Crusoes’ house (Sean’s place, that is). My big, loud friend
was the third of seven young Crusoes, four of whom were as big and loud as he was. The eldest
and the youngest were girls: Veronica, who was now a junior at Notre Dame, and Mary, who was
three or four grades below Noelle at St. Francis. Ronny was rather a heart-breaker (my first
crush, in fact), and had the sweetest temperament you’d ever care to encounter; Mary was
shaping up to have her sister’s looks and her brothers’ disposition, and was certain to be a
handful for any young man caught in her path. Danny, Sean’s older brother, was in the Marines,
and the other lads—Terry, Will, and Timmy—were spaced out over about half a dozen years
behind us.
Mama C. greeted me at the door with a big hug. She was a plump, bustling lady of the
sort that naturally attracted strays; every time a Crusoe brought home a friend, he or she became
a de facto Crusoe. The man of the clan was a construction foreman by trade, the biggest and
loudest of the lot and jollier than St. Nicholas after a bowl of spiked eggnog. I could tell he
wasn’t home yet by the mere fact that his voice, audible from any corner of the house, was not to
be heard. “Hiya, Mama,” I said, smiling.
“Hello, Joey dear. Come in, come in! Sean’s in the shower; the boys’ve been at it again.
He’ll be out in a bit. Would you like some tea? You drink too much soda, you know; it’s not good
for you.”
It was ultimately futile to decline anything offered by Mama C.—she would have made a
fortune as a card dealer in Vegas. I took the tea and told her about my week and my current
writing project, and she was just telling me about the latest depredations of her litter when the
main subject of the tale walked into the kitchen.
“Yo, Joe!” he proclaimed, and we bumped fists.
“I hear you’ve been roughing up the chillins again.”
“Gotta protect my status quo! I’m the alpha now, baby.”
Sean and his brothers engaged in some pretty violent wrestling matches on an almost
daily basis. Their father made no attempt whatsoever to prevent this, but had at least confined
them to the basement where the walls could take a pounding and the furniture was expendable.
I’d gotten sucked into quite a few of these conflicts myself over the years, and although I had
never yet won a match, it had done a great deal for my physical confidence.
“I hope you’re not too tired to combat the rising peril of the Ogre-lord.”
“Nonsense! I’m officially warmed up. Let’s do this thing.”
We dug some Cokes out of the fridge, heedless of Mama C.’s admonitions, and headed for
Sean’s room to work out our adolescent frustrations upon the enemies of justice. Terry stuck his
head in after a few minutes and said, “Hey, Joey. I thought I heard you in here. Wanna wrestle?”
“Sean Blaisius Crusoe is my acting representative in these matters, young Terrence. If he
has defeated you—I have defeated you.”
“Psssh, yeah.”
“Come in and shut the door or go away and shut the door, ass,” Sean growled.
Terry sighed and took a chair. “You know you can get an extra life in the squid room,
right?”
Soon all the brothers Crusoe were piled in there with us, and not long afterwards Mary
pushed her way in as well. “Why in tarnation did you run into those spears?” she demanded at
one point—a maid of no more than ten winters, mind you—when I had suffered a particularly
ignominious demise.
“It’s all part of my grand scheme,” said I, with fathomless tranquility.
“Yeah, your grand scheme to suck,” Will put in.
“Silence, knaves,” Sean commanded. “You are as the buzzing of flies to us.”
At length, Mr. Crusoe came home and we were all bidden out to the dining room for
supper. Mama C. was more straightforward than my own mother: any more than five people at
the table meant pizza. It was actually rare to see the whole family gathered thus, as the kids were
endlessly busy with their own comings and goings—sports, theater, vocational auto maintenance,
Taekwondo, Irish dancing, and general hullabaloo. “So, Joey!” Mr. Crusoe boomed. “How’s the
writing coming along?” He loved my humorous stuff; apparently he had a copy of my February
poem on his door at his latest site.
“Pretty well, sir. I’m trying to cook up something special for Easter.”
“Good! Good for you. Let us know how it turns out.”
“Will do.”
I spent the weekend at Sean’s and returned to Hopkins Hall late Sunday. After bantering
with my sister for a few minutes, I retired to my chambers and resumed the mantle of the
wordsmith. At last, as I had hoped, the powers of creation seemed to have aligned in my favor,
and I wrote four or five stanzas before I paused to re-read. Upon inspection, however, they
proved uninspired: not bad, just not especially good. Anyone might have written them. I
hesitated a bit, then salvaged one line that had a nice ring to it and scratched out the rest. Round
two: I got about twenty lines in and finally had to admit to myself that I was clearly writing a
Christmas poem here. It got the axe. After another hour of this, I went out and watched cop
shows with Mom for a while. Then I returned, wrote some more and deleted some more, and
finally went to bed.
The whole rest of the week was like that—long periods of dissipation followed by spurts
of mediocrity. I ended up with about ten lines that were decent, culled from about twenty whole
poems that were wretched, but they were all in different rhyme schemes and metrical styles, and
could by no labors be grafted together. In the end, I punched my wall and declared the whole
thing hopeless.
Monday’s meeting rolled around, and I slumped into my seat in quiet despair. Everyone
else submitted their glittering successes, and I slid a poem across the table into the stack. Sylvia
picked it up and read it through quickly. “Excellent, as always. Thank you, Joey.”
I mumbled something.
“What’s that?” She peered at me. “Hey—are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I just. . . I really wanted to do an Easter poem.” I had given up the struggle and
exhumed something I wrote in late January. It was a good poem. It just wasn’t the poem.
“Writer’s block, huh?”
“I dunno. I guess.”
“Well. For what it’s worth, I’m very happy with your contribution here. Anyway, now
you’ve got a whole year to write something for next Easter.”
“Thanks, Sylvia.”
She gave me that smile of hers. “Any time.”
In May I did another silly poem, which was very well received by our readers. When the
time came for the last issue of the school year in June, I thought I might coast by with yet
another one. But this time, that lovely young thorn in my heart put forth her editorial authority
and nixed my tetrametric retrospective on the history of Scottish were-sheep.
“Yes, Joey, it’s very funny. Maybe we’ll run it in September. But this is the last hurrah for
your junior year. Don’t you want to do something a little more significant?”
“Not really, no.”
“Tough. You’re doing a serious poem for our June issue, and you’ve got three days to do
it in. You’ll thank me when it’s over.”
“If by ‘thank’ you mean ‘wish I could disembowel’. . .”
She leaned forward and held my gaze intently. “Look—six months ago, you didn’t want
to write poetry at all. Turns out you’re not only great at it, but you love it. Don’t you?”
I sighed. “I suppose.”
“Then trust me. Go home and write something meaningful. Something you have to work
for. Grow.”
Well, I did trust her; but I didn’t go home. Instead I hopped in my trusty old Civic (Dave
by name) and went for a long drive. A great many things went through my mind, in no particular
order, but I didn’t really think about any of them—just watched them go by like the darkening
road signs outside in the gathering fog of dusk. At last I parked by the shores of Lake Evendim,
and walked in the sand beneath the summer stars. Something meaningful. My last hurrah.
It was only junior year, I reflected. A very small change, another bend in the rushing
watercourse of time. Next year, a greater change—from the lords of our school to the doe-eyed
neophytes of the larger world beyond. A little death, a birth into a mysterious new existence. The
end of our current year brought us closer to the end of next year, our senior year. Each day—each
moment, even the time taken by this very thought—brought us closer to the next great bend in
the river, and just a little closer to the absolute cataract that poured forever out of time into the
sea.
This time it wasn’t like “Jack Tar’s Woe.” I wasn’t suddenly hit with a blaze of
inspiration. Instead I seemed to become gradually aware of something colossal standing all
around me—like a man lost in thought, slowly realizing he’s wandered out of the woods into the
ruins of an ancient castle. I drove straight home, wrote all night, and found Sylvia first thing in
the morning to hand her my final poem as a junior at St. J. It was called “The Path,” and it was
my first serious stab at free verse.
Sempiternally the time-wheel turns, and death and life revolve,
And nothing seems to change, and nothing seems to change–
But a wheel revolves in order to advance.
All nature hurtles forward, blind and helpless in the grooves of time,
Yet one small beast can pause the ponderous flux, the entropy stampede,
And like a seraph rise to heights unguessed, to glimpse the path behind us and before.
Clay-scion, baked by heaven-fire; in the world, not of the world,
Beholding from afar the destined portals where the wheel-turn bears us to
(By time destroyed and by destruction born).
So let us step out of the unbending track into the clearing, this supernal glade,
Where you in my future and I in your past meet in a disconnected present,
And let us celebrate together
The passing of another year, the birthing of another year,
For every moment brings us closer to that which lies beyond the road of years.
Sylvia liked it. Our June issue came out the day before finals.Then we had two long and
hideous days of tests, and then there was one last morning, a half-day for the clearing out of
lockers and the turning in of books and whatnot. By ten o’clock that morn, I was as keyed up as
everyone else: one more hour—no, fifty-nine more minutes—and the summer was ours. All was
sailing smoothly along, with nary a wisp on the vista; and then, from the cerulean calm, there
came the lightning strike.
As we were sitting in homeroom organizing the textbooks that we would soon bequeath
to next year’s crop of juniors, the PA crackled into life. “Joseph Hopkins. Joseph Hopkins. Please
report to the principal’s office. Joseph Hopkins.”
“Oooh, busted!” Sean observed with his trademark subtlety. “They must’ve found out
about the orphans you poisoned for their gold.”
“If I go down, I’m taking you with me.” Curious, but not alarmed, I headed for the office.
Miss Nancy the secretary smiled and waved me by her desk to Fr. Brown’s room: the office
within the office, as no one ever called it until this very moment. I knocked and was bidden
inside.
The padre was a little fellow, somewhere in his sixties, with a quietly intense presence of
kindly wisdom. If the tales were true, he had been a missionary in the Soviet Union during the
worst of the persecutions, and had even met Pope John Paul II on a handful of occasions. Some
might have thought his current place as the principal of a small parochial school was a sort of
pre-retirement retirement, but he took it very seriously and had brought St. J back from the brink
of financial dissolution within a few years of taking the helm, just under a decade previously. He
rose courteously from behind his desk as I entered and offered me a chair.
“Thank you, Father,” I said, sitting down. I had met him as a freshman, of course, and
had exchanged amiable words with him several times over the past three years; but we weren’t
particularly close. I wondered what this was about, but it seemed impolite to rush him.
“So,” he said, sitting back down as well, “how has your year been, my friend?”
“Oh, er, pretty good, I think. I mean, I think I’m getting a C in Pre-Trig, but other than
that, I, you know, I think I did pretty well.”
“Excellent. I understand you had a bit of a rivalry with Steven Graveling.” His tone was
grave, but there was mirth in his eyes.
“Well, I wouldn’t—I mean, it wasn’t anything serious.” How in the world does he know
about that?
“Good. I believe Mr. Graveling has actually grown rather fond of you, although I doubt
he would admit as much.”
“He’s a good guy. I feel like we’ve gotten to the point that we’re more bantering than
bickering.”
He nodded. “You’re a magnanimous young man, Joey. For someone your age, just
discovering the extent of his gifts, you show remarkably little arrogance.”
“I’m, uh—I’m still working on that. Most of my friends are bigger than me.”
He laughed merrily. “Believe me, I know what you mean. Five foot four—it does tend to
humble one somewhat. Although of course, human nature and Satan’s cunning being what they
are, there’s always a temptation to compensate with intellectual pride. I trust you’re aware of the
peril.”
I nodded. It’d never occurred to me before, but what do you say?
“I’ve been reading your work in the Augury. It’s extraordinarily impressive for a high
school student. I hope you don’t mind my asking, but have you given any consideration to how
you might develop your talents in the future?”
“Oh—definitely. I mean, I—I figured I would sort of—study things and then. . . Okay,
no. I really haven’t thought about it much.”
“That’s nothing whatsoever to be embarrassed about. It would be nice if we could all step
out of high school into college and out of college directly into our life’s vocation; but sometimes
the path is a very great deal rockier than that. To speak in truth, my friend, I suspect that the Lord
has some rather special expectations for you and will therefore be particularly hard on you in the
years to come.”
“That’s a little ominous, Father.”
He shrugged. “Such is the nature of an omen. What are your plans for the summer?”
This conversation was a maze. “My—plans? I usually work at Papa Frank’s Diner in the
summer. Other than that. . .” I trailed off, and a grisly surmise came into my fervid brain.
“Why?”
“Joey, I think you should take a summer course at Winchester University. My very good
friend Dr. Claviger teaches a six-week poetry seminar there and I feel strongly that it would be of
the utmost value to you. The credits will be transferable to any college, and the class will be a
laurel in your transcript—but more importantly, Dr. Claviger will almost certainly be able to help
you grow as a poet.”
Why did everybody want me to grow? Frankly, I thought I was pretty good already. “I
don’t know if I can afford it.”
He smiled. “I’ve taken the liberty of showing the good doctor your latest contribution to
the Augury. You already have a spot in the class reserved, and tuition waived—partially as a
favor to me, and partially because he knows potential when he sees it.”
I stared at him.
“Take the class, son. It’s only two hours a day, for a grand total of thirty days. With a
little overtime, you can make that up in a week at Papa Frank’s. Take a master. Hone your skills.”
“I’ll—I’ll think about it,” I said heavily; but I already knew I would take the stupid class.
I’m a sucker for priestly advice.
So! We wrapped up our final day and headed for home, and I had three weeks of
indolence before being waylaid by more schooling. Sean and I wasted time together with the
rigor and acumen of old professionals, and I slung pasta at the diner four days a week to fund my
unnatural lust for junk food and Dave’s natural lust for gasoline. Report cards rolled in, and I did
better than I’d expected: a B- in Pre-Trig, and that was my lowest grade. Noelle did much better
than me, because—well—she’s much smarter than I am. But she had enough tact not to rub it in.
“What kind of a course do you think it’s gonna be?” she asked (again) on the morning of my
first class, as I was trying to get my socks on. She was fascinated by Fr. Brown’s intervention in
my literary career.
“I don’t know, little grotesquerie. Probably just a lot of reading and writing. How else do
you get good, except by practice?”
“Hey, you sounded like Dad just then.”
“Stuff it, Noelle.”
“It was a compliment,” she said, sounding injured.
I kissed her forehead and grabbed my bag. “I’ll see you tonight.”
“Good luck!”
Winchester U. was a small campus about twenty miles outside of town. I had done some
perfunctory reconnoitering the week before, so I at least knew what building to go to. Things
were quiet in the July heat as I paced across the quad beneath the evergreens. Duffman Hall was
an old and venerable brick building, a trifle weathered but with an air of enduring hard times
with geologic patience. I headed up the stairs and down the hall and stepped into Room 16B,
ready to be bored.
The room itself was too collegiately standard to bear much description—desks, windows,
blackboard, podium. Dr. Claviger wasn’t in yet—I was a few minutes early—but five of my
fellow students were lounging about as I came in, and they were right in the middle of some kind
of word game. A red-headed guy sitting on top of his desk was just saying, “There was once a
young lass from Peru”—and as he finished speaking, he made a throwing gesture with his hand
as if tossing a ball across the room.
The heavy-set girl at whom he had aimed raised her hands to catch the idea, hesitated for
a couple of seconds, and then said, “Who desired to be trained in kung-fu.” Then she repeated
the tossing gesture towards a Slavic-looking fellow at the back.
He caught it and said, “So she learned drunken style,” and passed it back to the red-head.
Red thought briefly and added, “And she said with a smile—” Then he turned toward the
door and heaved his arm at me like a man lobbing a grenade.
Instinctively, I mimicked the catching motion. A few seconds went by. Ten eyes watched
me with amused expectation. I opened my mouth and out popped, “‘I could drink Bruce Lee
under the loo’?”
The room erupted in applause. “Not bad, new kid!” cried Red. “Toss it back.” I cocked
my arm to throw, but he interrupted, “No, no, no, start it off first.”
“Er—there once was a man from Zimbabwe.” I tossed the nascent limerick to the heavy-
set girl, who laughed and came back with, “Who liked to eat corn on the cobwe.”
She passed it to another girl, who said, “He spat out his corn,” and passed it to the Slavic
guy, who said, “One atypical morn,” and passed it right back to me.
I cogitated for an instant and concluded, “And his grandmother called him a slobwe.”
They clapped again, and I found myself laughing as well. “You got the moves, my man,”
Red approved. “What’s your name?”
I took a desk. “Hopkins. Joey Hopkins.”
“I’m Gene. This here’s Danielle, Fred-O, Pavel, and Foxy Roxy; but any of us’ll answer
to ‘hey!’”
Danielle, she of the “corn on the cobwe” line, asked, “Do you go to Winchester?”
“No, I’m about to be a senior at St. John Vianney. My principal thought I should take a
class with Dr. Claviger.”
“Wow, you must be smart. We’re all fixin’ to be sophomores here. Dr. C. taught us the
limerick game last semester.”
At these words, as if summoned by a conjuror, the doctor himself walked in. “Let us
begin,” he said, instantly, before even closing the classroom door. Without actually getting to
their feet, everyone nevertheless snapped to attention, and I found myself fumbling for a pen and
taking rapid notes before I had a chance to form any impression of my new poet-sensei.
“Art is the pursuit of truth through beauty,” he said, moving to the podium. A quick
glance revealed him to be tall and lean, silver-haired and academically dressed, and somewhere
in the neighborhood of Fr. Brown’s age. He spoke evenly and with great assurance. “Poetry is the
art of refining words to their purest and most powerful form. A strong poem can alter the mind
and heart of a free-willed human being; and that, my friends, is nothing more, less, nor other than
magic.”
He strode to the blackboard and began dashing out names. Most of them I recognized, but
there were a few I’d never heard of. “In this class, you will take a few toddling steps towards
discovering your own writer’s voice. You will read voluminous amounts, by numerous poets
with widely differing styles, and you will begin as all learning begins, by imitation. Like Edison,
you will discover ten thousand approaches which fail to illuminate, and at last—perhaps—you
will gain a glimpse of the one approach that may someday succeed.” He whirled back toward us.
“Time is short! We commence with the master himself: William Shakespeare. For the next three
days you will be writing. . . sonnets.”
I barely managed to suppress a groan. Sonnets, I thought. Why did it have to be sonnets?
*
The next few weeks exist in my memory as a perfect cinematic training montage. The
days went swirling by, ababble with endless reams of poetry in all imaginable shapes and sizes,
and the interstices teemed with Dr. Claviger’s terse pronouncements of meaning and verity.
Somehow he always made us feel that time was running out, that we weren’t writing fast enough.
“Remember that truth and falsehood are at war in our universe. At any moment you may be
called upon to strike a blow.”
After we finished studying sonnets, we wrote clerihews, a comic form invented by E.C.
Bentley, close friend of the great G.K. Chesterton. My best one went:
Erwin Schrödinger
Couldn’t be forbodinger.
He boxed up a feline
And split the space-time continuum
Into A-line and B-line.
Next we did grommets, a form invented by Dr. Claviger himself: a regular haiku—three
lines of five, seven, and five syllables—but each line was a self-contained palindrome. I wrote on
Lady Macbeth:
Red dame, none madder
Doom-gal on a no-lag mood
Work raw, li’l war-krow!
Then we got to learn about double dactyls, invented by the American poets Anthony
Hecht and John Hollander. This was my favorite of all, and I wrote quite a few—but the most
relevant one went like this:
Higgledy-piggledy
Training in poetry
Dactylic push-ups and
Limerick laps.
Building up brain-muscle
Verboaerobically
Right up until we all
Fry a synapse.
“This is just boot camp,” he told us once, sternly. “Don’t imagine that when you finish
this class you will have accomplished something; this is merely your preparation for
accomplishments to come. A poet who studies only poetry is no poet—you must go forth from
here and study science and history and philosophy and romance and sports and music and beer.
Thus comes wisdom, and if you have power without wisdom then you’re only a loony on a
soapbox in the park. And power? That comes through living life—through fun and faith and
fighting, and travel and love, and most especially through pain. If you have wisdom without
power then you’re only an entomologist, pinning dead specimens to an empty page.”
I could say with total certainty that I’d never had a teacher like this before.
Meanwhile, the summer went along in the usual way, with this new plane of perception
oddly juxtaposed on top of my daily rounds. I wrought verse in my head while bussing tables at
Papa Frank’s, and I spent hours driving through the countryside with my conscious brain
switched off, simply being in the world. Sean, a closet intellectual who pretended to take nothing
seriously, once remarked, “This class is a pretty big deal to you, huh?”
We were downtown with a couple of other friends at the time, poking around some
abandoned buildings. No one had mentioned writing of any kind, in any connection. “What
makes you think the class is a big deal?” I asked, puzzled.
“Because you’re speaking in iambic pentameter. You’ve been doing it for the last hour
straight.”
“. . . Oh.” We were doing blank verse that week. (To this day, while Tennyson isn’t my
favorite poet overall, “Ulysses” remains my favorite single poem.) “Thanks. I didn’t even
realize.”
“I figured. Whattaya say we have a Magnum, P.I. marathon this weekend— disengage
your literary faculties for a while?”
“It’s only two more weeks.”
“Yeah, sure. I just hope you don’t cut your ear off before then.”
“Dude, I’m not a painter.”
At that moment, Bobby Sanger came lunging laboriously around the corner at us, firing
twin imaginary hand-guns in extreme slo-mo. We had no choice but to respond in kind, and the
deadly dance was joined. Many of our imaginary comrades fell that day.
In the fifth week, we were finally greenlit for free verse. “Young poets like free verse
because they think it requires no effort,” Dr. Claviger said irritably. “They don’t grasp the
enormity of rigor and erudition that underlies the work of someone like Eliot. You can’t
transcend the rules until you’ve mastered them—until they’ve become not second nature but first
nature. That’s why we cut our teeth on sonnets. But the time for free verse has come.” (I think it
took a conscious exertion for him not to conclude that sentence with, “you maggots!”) “Let’s
begin.”
I wrote three new poems that week, and recycled an unpublished one I’d written back in
March (thrift, Horatio). By the end of it, I was just about through with writing: I’d reached the
point of absolute fatigue, where all the fibers break down. Of course, that’s exactly where the
work gets done. He gave us a single assignment for the weekend: one last poem, in any style and
on any subject we chose. “Take Monday off,” he added. “On Tuesday we start our last week.
We’ll spend it sharing our work—yes, even I’ll write something—and critiquing one another.
Thus far, no one’s seen your words but me; next week, everyone sees everyone’s. So put your
hearts into it.”
As we were filing out of the room, Gene called us all together in the hallway. “Guys—I
think a brain-storming session is in order here. We’re all gonna be seeing each other’s stuff
anyway; I say we grab some chow and bounce some ideas around.”
To this, all agreed. We fell back and regrouped at the nearest Denny’s, and there over
coffee and grease we laid our plans. Pavel talked about reverting to the sonnet form for some
old-fashioned love poetry. Gene and Roxy wanted to try more free verse. I was thinking of doing
double dactyls again—maybe chaining two or three together into a longer piece.
“Honestly,” Danielle said, “Dr. Seuss is still my favorite—I don’t care what anyone says.
I think I’ll try doing something in his, you know, his idiom. Might even illustrate it.”
“I didn’t know you could draw,” said Roxy.
“I can’t! Not even a little. But hey, no guts, no glory.”
“I can draw,” Pavel offered. “I could be your staff artist, if you like.”
“That’d be fun. Although I don’t know if we’re allowed to collaborate.”
Gene shrugged. “He never said we couldn’t.”
“Wait a minute,” I said slowly. “Wait a minute. What if we—we, the six mighty chosen
ones of 16B—what if we all collaborated? What if we got together and did one long corporate
poem?”
Pavel looked skeptical. “I don’t know, man. Writers and artists working together is one
thing, because they each have separate fields, but I think composing poetry is kind of a lone wolf
gig.”
“You’re absolutely right, but remember what the doc says: this is just boot camp here.
After next week, we’ll go on to start writing our own new stuff, but for now we’re still doing
training exercises. We should try things that force us to look at the writing process differently.
Lemme tell you how I got started in all this.” Briefly, I described Sylvia and the little sonnet we
made back in Commander Mark’s class. “Why do you think Dr. C. taught us the limerick game?
To help us look at a developing work from a perspective other than our own.”
There was a short silence. “You know,” Danielle said after a few moments, “that’s
actually a pretty good point.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Fred said, frowning. “But how are we going to find something we can all
agree to write about?”
“We’ll have Cindy pick a topic.” Cindy was our waitress. “By the way, you never said
what you were planning for your poem.”
He played with his knife. “Ever hear of Allen Cromwell?”
“Nope.”
Danielle scowled. “I’ve heard of him. He’s an up-and-coming poet from somewhere out
west. He writes for The Dark and weirdo magazines like that—real creepy stuff.”
“He might be creepy, but he’s got power,” Fred retorted. “He stays in your head.”
At that moment, Cindy came back to refill our coffee cups. “Hey, can you do us a favor?”
I asked.
“Sure, hon. What do you need?”
“We need a topic. Any topic at all—first thing that pops into your head.”
“Um. . . okay. How about that salt shaker?”
“Perfect! Thank you, Cindy.”
She smiled. “Glad I could help.”
“So there it is,” I said. “In the whole history of human language, has there ever been a
poem about a salt shaker constructed by not one but half a dozen trained, expert writers?”
“Quite probably not,” Gene admitted. “What the heck, I’m in.”
Danielle nodded. “Me too.”
Pavel and Roxy acquiesced, and the five of us eventually badgered Fred into joining our
crack team. We spent the next couple of hours kicking ideas around, went home, and returned to
the same Denny’s the next day. By Saturday afternoon, we had a more or less finished product. I
fear to allow it to fall into the hands of posterity, but I suppose I can reveal the first few lines to
give a general impression. They were written by myself, Danielle, and Fred in turn, and went: “It
is an ancient Salt-shaker, it stoppeth one of three. / It flabberflams and swogglebams the very
sanity. / And like the hopes of mortal man, it shaketh aft agley.” The poem itself wasn’t fantastic,
but we ended up having a lot of fun with it. Pavel even illustrated it, anthropomorphizing our
shaker into a rather debonair little sodium dispenser, replete with top hat and cane (the latter of
which I feel sure contained a hidden sword). I spent Sunday and Monday carousing with the
Crusoes, and on Tuesday we returned to face the judgment of Dr. Claviger.
He himself had written a grommet about mummies, which he transcribed on the board to
start things off. We spent about ten minutes discussing the merits and flaws of the piece, and of
the form as a whole; he admitted that its chief use was as an exercise for the brain, and that it was
unlikely ever to produce immortal gems of literature. “Still,” he said, “it’s fun; and let us
never forget the importance of plain, simple fun when it comes to reading and writing. And now,
if we’ve finished with my little contribution—who would like to be the next to share his or her
handiwork with the class?”
The others had agreed that, as the collaboration was my idea, the onus of reading should
be mine. I had accepted with due solemnity, and I now came to my feet to read “The Shaker”
aloud. “This is by all of us,” I said by way of introduction, and that seemed to catch the doctor’s
attention. It was three pages long, so I read it through and then brought it up to his desk so he
could peruse it at leisure (and gaze upon the Pavel-drawn visage of Rufus Shakeedoo). His head
was bowed, and his shoulders were trembling slightly. I wondered if he might be having an
apoplectic fit.
Then he raised his face, and it was bright red with merriment. “That is one of the
stupidest poems I have ever heard. Let me see if I can guess who wrote what.”
We spent the rest of that class and the next analyzing the various masters whose
techniques we had co-opted, and which parts of our poem worked and which didn’t, and why. Dr.
Claviger was satisfied with our efforts—indeed, he remarked that we were the first class who had
ever done such a thing. “Originality for its own sake is gibberish. But if you can find a new way
to utter the old sagacities, then you’ve done something worthwhile.”
On Thursday he brought us pizza. “This is it,” he said. “No class tomorrow. Your grades
will be emailed out by Monday, but I can tell you in advance that I’m very pleased with all of
you. It’s been an excellent summer.”
So, we feasted and talked and laughed, and at last began to drift away. Soon only Gene,
Danielle, and I remained, playing the old limerick game with the good doctor; and after I
finished the last piece of sausage and green pepper, I too rose to depart.
“See you around, Joey,” Danielle said, and hugged me.
“Definitely. Take care.”
“Hey, before you go,” Gene said, “—There was once a young man from Sri Lanka.”
I smiled. “To whom all the Germans said danke. Dr. Claviger, thank you for everything.”
He took my hand in a firm grip. “Thank you, Joseph. You’re a hard worker, and you have
tremendous talent. I’ll be watching the Augury with interest.”
“Yes, sir.”
Danielle added, “For he gave them all beer. . .”
“See ya, guys,” I said, and headed for the door.
Behind me, Gene shouted, “And good chocolates, bought dear—heads up, Hopkins!”
I didn’t even turn around: just slammed it over my shoulder like a backfist. “And the
severed head of Willy Wonka.”
My training was complete.
To be continued…
Jamey Toner is the co-author of Brides of Christ, a picture book from the Benedictine Sisters of Mary Queen of Apostles. He was also involved in the creation of three beautiful children, although his wife did the lion(ess)’s share of the work. Toner can never be sufficiently thankful for these things, but he is working very hard at being still and knowing that God is God.
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