This is an excellent example of an entry in the planned anthology of why poets become poets.
Poets Talking About How They Became Poets
Submission by Valeria Nollan
The earliest stirrings of writing poetry I can trace back to when I was a child, a Russian immigrant whose parents were World War II prisoners-of-war in Germany. I was born in one of the UN’s post-war Displaced Persons camps in Hamburg, West Germany. My parents ended up being in Germany for fourteen years, and when I was four obtained visas to the U.S. for the three of us just by chance. At that time, in the late 1950s, there were many refugees in Europe and everyone was trying to flee that part of the world. I still have the document that identifies me as being “statenslos” (stateless, not belonging to any country).
The sense of being displaced, not having a stable core identity, and existing on the boundary between two cultures—Russian and American—has never left me. It has informed much of my poetry and much of my search for wholeness. These sensibilities, along with not knowing English, contributed to my living within myself, in linguistic worlds (mainly Russian, but some Ukrainian as well) in which there was a clarity of meaning for me. Something to hang onto. I learned English slowly, since the Americans were always “on the outside” of the cultural community in which my parents and their friends functioned. Perhaps because I am an only child (a terrible phrase), I developed a closeness to and compassion for animals large and small. The non-linguistic-based ways in which I communicated with them satisfied a need that has never left me. They understood me.
My creative writing in those early years was formed by listening to Russian art songs, Russian operas, and the poems and fairy tales that my father would read to me at bedtime. Poetry and music, the twin sisters, engaged language in ways that elevated my spirits. I wrote, learned to play the piano, and sang in choirs. I raised small birds—parakeets and canaries—with designated flying areas in our house. And I treated injured animals in our backyard. When one of them died, I would scrawl in a small tablet a short poem eulogizing the creature. Recently I found some scraps of those outpourings of grief, and they contain attempts on my part as a young girl to be dignified in my mourning.
My paternal grandfather was a major poet in southern Russia, whose collected works ran to over twenty volumes. My father in emigration edited a collection of his father’s poetry and religious philosophy. My mother would sometimes read Pushkin, or Blok, or Esenin to me. In high school I studied languages and literature, planning to continue with these subjects in college. I double-majored in Russian and English language and literature at the University of Delaware; while there, I composed poetry in a small notebook. Most of it was undeveloped and too wordy, but it expressed the feelings of a young adult trying to make sense of her surroundings. I read the poems only to a few close friends. I continued with Russian language and literature on the M.A. and Ph.D. levels at the University of Pittsburgh. One of my professors there was the distinguished poet Ivan Elagin. I will never forget the insights into poetry of his courses, as well as his mesmerizing poetry readings. During those readings the air was charged with almost palpable electricity and excitement. In graduate school I began to translate Russian poetry into English, and some of it was published in professional journals. This period of my life was also characterized by a major intestinal illness that nearly took my life, but competent medical care gradually brought about recovery. Thus, the themes of being bilingual and bicultural, of having endured physical suffering for many years, of being renewed by the salvific effect of poetry and music, and of recognizing the transformational power of artistic beauty—these understandings have carried me through the decades of my life. They helped me to maintain a sense of well-being by expressing of necessity the feelings swirling around inside me and by giving those calling out for help (such as the animals of the world) a clear and determined voice.
I write poetry because it represents the most authentic aspect of my identity, and I sing because, as a bird, I have a song.*
*The phrase “a bird sings because it has a song” is often attributed to Maya Angelou. However, it was first penned by Joan Walsh Anglund in 1967 in her poetry book A Cup of Sun. I’ll add that the caged bird sings because it is a male plaintively calling for a mate, trying desperately to escape its solitary confinement.
My Lifelong Bond with Poetry by Changming Yuan
In the winter of 1972, shortly after moving from Lianhuadang, an isolated village in central China, where I grew up as a foster child, to the county town of Songzi, to attend high school, I stumbled upon a tattered copy of Shikan (Poetry Journal). Only then did I discover that there were readings far more engaging than the Chinese textbooks we were given in the village school. From that moment on, I not only “borrowed” poetry chapbooks from the library without permission but even struck a bargain with my Chinese teacher to hand in poems instead of prose for composition assignments.
After graduating from high school and being sent down to work on the Mayuhe Forest Farm on the southern bank of the Yangtze River, I secretly wrote more than twenty poems, which I thought were reasonably good, but every submission I sent out disappeared into void – I didn’t even receive a standardized rejection slip. Utterly discouraged, I set poetry aside until, years later, I wrote poems again while courting the girl who become my wife. After our marriage, I carried with me a collection of 500 love poems to Beijing, where through my thesis advisor’s recommendation, I sought guidance from Du Yunxie, then an editor of Shikan. But before I hardly finished my self-introduction, he mocked me bluntly. Mortified and shamefaced, I left in silence. Back in Tianjin, I devoted myself entirely to scholarship and abandoned all my literary ambitions.
It was not until more than two decades later that my literary dream revived. On the evening of August 6, 2004, the day before I returned to Vancouver after my first and only family tour to Banff, I proposed at our dinner table to climb the hill behind the hotel to get a panoramic view of the landscape, but neither my wife nor my two sons showed any interest. To follow the ancient Chinese tradition popular among literary scholar-officials, I decided to go alone and “climb high to see afar.”
At first, I enjoyed taking this solitary walk at twilight. However, when I was half way to the hilltop, I suddenly felt a strong impulse to yell as hard as possible, like the mad man in Edvard Munch’s famous painting. For God knows how long, I had been hoping to deflate all the negative feelings deposited at the bottom of my heart over the past years, including disappointment, despondence, dissatisfaction, hopelessness, boredom, fatigue, exhaustion, nervousness, anxiety, stressfulness, shame, anger, fear, self-contempt, self-hatred, loss of direction as well as an ever-strong sense of deprivation of love and the loss of meaning, which had made my life so full of hardships it was now only half-worth living at most. To me, this screaming was relaxing enough though it was merely a momentary discharge. Without having done so, I knew that I would explode down the road, like the high tech bubble. Then, standing at a high point on the stiff slope, I turned around and didn’t see a single soul within sight. Accompanied by my own shadow only, I started to sing aloud just as I had done during my first solo patrol as a forest ranger in Mayuhe thirty years before. While singing the old songs that I had most loved to sing as a zhiqing [educated youth during the Cultural Revolution], I became choked with emotions that presented a contrast to my adolescent sentiments. Back then, I was full of hope and energy, prepared to take any tests, endure any physical hardships, and make any sacrifice to secure a rosy future. Whether it was a devil or a deity, I would readily stand up to take the challenge and fight with all my courage and strength should it block my way in any sense. For reasons unclear to myself, I had highest expectations of myself. Naturally, I had felt uplifted and light-hearted even when I faced nothing less than a torture there as a pest controller. But at this antlike moment, after all that I had gone through, despite all the achievements I had made in this world, I found myself downgraded lamentably to a petty, poor and powerless money-making machine, running endlessly without any lubricant or maintenance. At age forty seven, my heart had long since become overfilled with every kind of negative feeling. Such striking psychological contrast was so bitterly ironical that the more I sang the songs like a braying donkey, the harder I found it to hold back my emotions. Then and there, I broke down finally, shivering violently with sorrow, anxiety and despondency, deeply worried that my life would soon come to a meaningless end before I could find meaning in it. For the first time in my entire life, I was so overwhelmed with fear and self-pity I could not stop crying until I totally collapsed. In so doing, I somehow got a refreshing sense of relief. Perhaps I had just gone through a process of Aristotelian catharsis, like those who were watching a heart-wrenching tragedy? Probably. I knew that I was the most serious and most sympathetic audience of my own tragedy, so I was the one most touched.
As I climbed to the hilltop, I found myself standing in the heart of a copse of tall pines, a scene so strangely familiar or familiarly strange, which made me feel as if I’d returned to Mayuhe as a ranger patrolling alone. Quite lost between memory and reality, I felt an increasingly stronger urge to write something. With neither a pen nor any paper in hand, I desperately looked around and luckily found a broken pencil beside a rock as well as a faded piece of poster in a ditch. As it was getting darker, I squatted down against a tree and began to compose my very first poem in Canada. Probably because I thought of the title “The Lonely Climber” first in English, I used English rather than my mother tongue as my chosen language of expression. For the record, here’s the piece, however clumsy or lousy it was:
The Lonely Climber
You are tired, terribly tired,
Tired of climbing alone,
For too long,
Along an unknown path near Mt Quazilla.
Your sons refused to join you;
They don’t like your company.
Your wife laughed at your idea,
Unable to share your eccentricity.
Your fellow tourists are relaxing
In their cozy rooms in the villa,
Indifferent to your intent or interest.
You spotted a muffin-colored rock,
Wondering if it is the philosopher’s stone
Or what Nuwa used to mend the sky.
Encountering a deer,
You sang above the top of your voice
To release your feeling against the clouds
But the echo scared her away,
Reminding you of your loneliness and tiredness
***
I have been hoping
To get my own vision of the world
Beyond the hills and mountains,
But each time I climbed onto a little ridge,
I found another one just ahead of me.
I stopped, hesitated and looked back,
More times than I can remember;
I know there is nothing for me on the peak,
Except a few wild plants,
Or a new branch of an old tree.
No matter what, I kept climbing,
Driven more by the inertia of life
Than by my own free will.
***
It is not a question of
Climbing or not climbing;
Nor a choice between two roads:
He will eventually see
No road, no human footprints.
“When there are more people climbing
There will be a path,” as someone had said
On the other side of the earth.
All he tries to do is to forget
The human world with all its frustrations
Hardships and boredoms.
Even if he can never escape,
He can leave all negativities down there
At the foot of the mountain
At least for now.
I finished the last line at 8:35 pm when a shower began out of the blue. So, I quickly put my poem in my pocket and ran down all the way to my hotel.
I had no slightest idea if I was going to scribble more pieces in English after this incident, nor did I feel like going on to pursue my forlorn dream to become a serious poetry author; however, I knew that this improvisational work had a special significance to me, not because it marked something unique in my career as a student and teacher of English as a second language, but because it documented my most intensive feeling at a most unforgettable moment in my entire life.
In the following week after I return to Vancouver, I turned out several more pieces not as an exercise for the improvement of my writing skills, but as a way to blow off some steam. As I continued tutoring around all over the city, I came to see poetry writing as an unfailing way of getting some peace of the mind. This became clearer after I did some reading about Buddhism and Daoism with a view to obtaining spiritual support that I had been looking for in recent years. However, I realized that the prose work by Lin Qingxian, a renowned writer from Taiwan, was much more readable and intriguing than any other Chinese books I could borrow from the local library. In particular, I found the chan element in his writing both spiritually soothing and literarily entertaining.
Meanwhile, I thought of John Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” a poem I had taught at the University of Saskatchewan, and got a more sympathetic understanding of how the young English poet felt about the spiritual pleasure that he had experienced in reading the great epic for the first time. Of course, Lin’s prose sketches were incomparable to Homer’s epic in a literary sense, but I did find Lin’s writing as inspiring to me as the poetic elements in Chapman’s translation work to Keats. With this new discovery, I began to see poetry not merely as a reading material of general interest, but as my personal salvation, my soulmate or my most helpful psychological therapy. Whenever I felt my soul wandering lonely as a cloud in the wasteland or lost in nowhere between misery and darkness, I turned to poetry, where I could find some light, warmth, peace as well as a cozy dwelling place for my inner self, whether I was engaged in writing or reading it.
By the end of the year, I had written as many as three dozen poems, ranging thematically from philosophical musings over my own life experiences to the most ancient myths in Chinese history. On the Christmas day, I decided to take a few hours off to do something about my poetic work. After selecting those I considered best written, and printing out twenty copies of them, I mailed them out without letting anybody know it, just as I had done in Mayuhe as a teenager. Several months later, I received a rejection slip, and then more and more, but this did not really discourage me; instead, I felt quite encouraged because I got some responses at least. Given my early shameful experience with Chinese editors, I found that though standardized, a rejection in print was much more comforting than total ignorance.
As I doodled additional poems in English, I kept refining and sending them out secretly whenever I had time, until sometime in May, 2005, when I finally received my very first acceptance letter in my whole life. It just so happened that on my wife’s birthday, my contributor’s copy arrived with a ten-dollar cheque from Byline, a small US-based literary press. When I took my wife and children to Number 9, our family’s favorite restaurant, to celebrate her anniversary as a rule, I presented the magazine with the cheque to her as a birthday gift. This is my first poem ever published:
South China Cicada
no human ear has ever heard of you
cloistering yourself deep in the soil
silently sucking all sounds from roots
for more than thirteen years in a row
until high up on a summer painted twig
you slough off your earthly self
pouring all your being in a single song
before the sun sets for the yellow leaf
Knowing nothing about the contemporary North American poetry scene, I believed it was sheer luck for me to get my English poems occasionally accepted. To gauge my true level of skill, I sent my work to a veteran American poetry critic as advised by my newly made poet-friend Koon Woon in 2006. The critic’s response was objective enough, but his conclusion sounded subtly sarcastic to me when he noted how lucky I had managed to get some of my poems published. To prove myself, I ignored my wife’s complaints as well as the ridicule and dismissiveness of others, and kept writing poetry. As time went by, I wrote more and more, averaging over 13 poems a month (one day I drafted as many as 33). I constantly expanded my subject matter and pursued diversity and innovation in style and form. To date, I have published poems in over 2,000 English-language publications across 52 countries and 16 solo poetry collections. Some of my works have been recommended as reading materials for colleges and high schools, and others have been included in various “best” poetry anthologies. I have been nominated for the American Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net multiple times; in 2022, I was even invited to serve on the poetry jury for the 44th Canadian National Magazine Award. Looking back on my 20-year writing career, I’ve gone from a poor village boy who didn’t start learning the English alphabet until around 19 to becoming probably the most published poetry author from contemporary China in the English speaking world. The most important contributions I have made are 1/ I invented what I call “bilinguacultural poetry,” a sub-genre that seemed to have been received quite well; and 2/ I have written and published more love poems than anyone I know, because of my “puppy love” I reencountered in 2019 after nearly fifty years of separation.
As a poetry author, I realize that self-affirmation may be important and necessary, but self-challenging is more rewarding. Still full of self-doubt, I’m not sure if I have true poetic talents, while few of my fellow Chinese-speaking editors or readers have demonstrated any interest in my poetic work. However, I firmly believe that I have a deep bond with English poetry. Seeking neither fame nor money, every time I write, I simply respond to the call of my heart. For me, as for ancient Chinese literary critics, “poetry is an outlet of emotions”!
[Note: This article was based on two personal essays, one titled “My Connection with Poetry,” originally written in Chinese, published in 《世界华人周刊(文学版）旧金山专版第183期》(World Chinese Weekly, literary supplement, Special San Francisco edition, issue 183), the other “Sublimation,” first published in Spinozablue (2024).
Koon Woon on Poetry as a Survival Technique
10.7.13
P&W-supported poet Koon Woon, October’s Writer in Residence, was born in a timeless village in China in 1949. In 1960 he immigrated to Washington State, first to the logging town of Aberdeen, then to Seattle, where he now resides. He turned to poetry while he was a mathematics and philosophy student coping with mental illness. Later he attended the workshops of Nelson Bentley at the University of Washington. At the age of forty-eight, Koon’s first book, The Truth in Rented Rooms, was published by Kaya Press. 
It might sound like a stretch, but poetry saved my life—along with the care of psychotherapists, the kindness of my dear friend Betty Irene Priebe, and a continuous parade of literary friends.
Even though I was appointed literary chairman in high school, I could not attend the meetings after school because I had to help out in my family’s Chinese-American restaurant. I tried to study mathematics and philosophy in college, but mental illness was sneaking up on me. I had a full-blown psychotic episode in the streets of San Francisco at age twenty-seven, and was involuntarily hospitalized. I was shouting alarming verses on Stockton and Vallejo Streets at the edge of Chinatown, just a few blocks from the City Lights Bookstore.
I had no idea then that City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti would one day blurb my first book, The Truth in Rented Rooms, and sell it in his bookstore. (P&W has supported both Ferlinghetti and the store over the years.)
I wrote because I could assuage my mental illness by clarifying to myself my feelings and perceptions of reality. My first publication was “Goldfish,” which appeared in a literary tabloid called Bellowing Ark, started by a fellow student of poet Nelson Bentley at the University of Washington. The poem is about an animal perceived as a regal creature admired by emperors in daylight; but at night, the goldfish turns into a carp, a sharp, silver dagger conspiring to take their lives.
Many academic poets have at least a full-length book out with a prize (and also a price) attached, and a teaching position. But my relationship to poetry always felt more personal than professional—more intense, more weighty. For me, poetry was an attempt to regain my sanity. (This struggle was later collected in a chapbook, The Burden of Sanity, first published by Joe Musso’s Hellp Press.)
Now, at age sixty-four, my second book, Water Chasing Water, is out, thanks to editor Sunyoung Lee and Kaya Press, the world’s foremost English-language publisher of literature of the Asian diaspora. My books have found their way into universities.
I never set out to become a published poet. I entered the literary world through the back door, writing to channel my emotions instead of acting out in the streets. One can almost say I had a utilitarian reason to write poetry. But I am not an armchair poet. I became active in the literary community–active enough to form a literary press and to edit and publish a poetry magazine for twenty years. I also judge contests and sponsor poetry readings and workshops, several of which have been supported by Poets & Writers, Inc.
This month, I will blog about the poetry scene in Seattle and some of the poets and facilitators of readings and workshops. Increasingly, Seattle is becoming a thriving literary community that deserves the nation’s attention.
Photo: Koon Woon reads with Beacon Bards at the Station coffee shop in Seattle. Credit: Greg Bem.
Support for Readings/Workshops events in Seattle is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.
Comments
jherschlag replied on October 8, 2013 – 5:15pm Permalink
Writing For Survival
Dear Mr. Woon,
I also wrote for survival, compulsively. At age forty-five I had sudden recall of my disastrously abusive childhood, and writing helped make sense out of chaos. My chapbook, Bully In The Spolight, expresses some of that turmoil. It’s published by Pudding House Publications. You can read some of my poems at poetryjane.com to see how writing preserved my sanity. My 1000 page memoir, poorly written at first, also helped me release fears and unspeakable truths. Writing is not a lonely art, as some say, but a wonderfully reliable companion, willing to hear and witness what others are not. I look forward to reading your work.
Thanks,
Jane
koonwoon replied on October 9, 2013 – 1:39am Permalink
Your Chapbook
Hi Jane,
I am familiar with Pudding Publications. I was in issue #17 of Pudding (magazine). I am very gratified that you found healing and solace also through writing. Best wishes and best of luck to both of us and to others who write as a need for self-repair or for the preservation of civilization itself.
Thank you for responding.
Marjorie Sadin on why she writes poetry:
I am a disabled senior and Koon published my first full-length book of poetry when I was sixty, Vision of Lucha. Vision of Lucha is about family, struggle, death and love. Since then, Koon has published subsequent books of mine including two chapbooks and another full-length book, Your Breath, Selected and New Poems. As a child, I moved around the States a lot. When I was eighteen, I was diagnosed with Schizo-affective disorder. My poetry writing got me through a lot of mania and despair. I lived for thirty years in the District of Columbia taking part time jobs teaching ESL and tutoring. My mother, who I was very close to died in 2010. And my father died just a few years ago. I met a man when I was sixty who changed my life. We got married six years ago and it has been the happiest years of my life. But my husband suffers from severe lung disease. So, it is a mixed blessing. I have continued to write poetry, taking classes online with the Poetry School in London and I teach Poetry Appreciation and Writing at a local community center. Koon and I have remained friends keeping up with our latest endceavors.
Jennifer Carrasco on being artist and poet:
Opening the Gates
Transcendence. An ache for a personal authentic beauty and order. When it’s good, you feel like you are channeling something electric and flowing. Exultation.
A friend asked me how I was able to give my all to my painting and poetry. How to stop an early edit from killing my beginnings.
When I was able to paint well (I can’t anymore because of an advancing tremor), I would get my materials in order–paint brushes, paint, canvas and paper, and maybe pencil some thumbnail sketches. A painter’s version of a chef’s mise en place.
Sometimes it was obvious there was only one direction. However, with a large mural commission, twenty thumbnail ideas might bring together a good combination. My equivalent of this with poetry or prose, is letting go with a stream of consciousness, then looking the pages over, getting rid of the dreck, and then developing the good stuff. Keeping in mind the sensory input; look, feel, smell, taste, temperature, and spatial qualities.
With painting, I would do small color studies to establish my palette. Because I worked so large with murals, this approach kept me from making Big Problems with the final piece. Also, because my murals were for a client, I needed to establish specifications and get approval before I started on their large project.
My personal paintings were more fluid. I had an idea, would do a few sketches, decide on my color palette and images and again get my materials organized. Then I would go for it, often discovering a new and better direction in the process. Staying open.
Once preliminary preparations were accomplished, then the pleasure and anticipation began. With painting, it’s closer to singing but with color. All that luscious laying on and lifting of paint. And with mural projects, it was very physical, because I was working on such a large scale. I moved back and forth, across and up on at least a 12’x8′ canvas; balancing shape, color, texture and line. An orange blending into a red in the left hand side needed a spot or two of that color on the other side, or toward the middle. Such urgency, such total engagement. But not always successful. The arts enchant and tantalize.
So much genuine original work comes out of the body. How the body is “talking” that day through your brush or your consciousness, the use of color, senses,feeling and shape–how intense all those factors were at the time you were painting/writing about the image or event.
Poetry or prose takes more out of me. I could go all night when I’m on track with a painting; with writing I writhe in my seat, scratch my head, yawn and twitch. I have to let an unchecked cascade of thoughts and visions tumble down onto my page– fill it with a pool of words and images. My visual considerations always underpin my writing. Only then does the editing start–chopping out my digressions, the “thats”, and the useless adverbs.
Then I might decide to archive the writing or turn the painting to the wall for a while. Or abandon it as a bad idea forever.
How I became interested in poetry, by David Gilmour
“How I Became Interested in Poetry”
(Entered 8/20/2025, revised 9/1/2025)
[Mea Culpa: A short explanation for the revision; I got caught up in bubbles that needed to be burst because they were false bubbles. This error is an admission of my frail memory that was able to be corrected by another side of my memory which is outside of myself. My son, Andrew, read my essay; he has the library of my four Rupert annuals he kept for showing to his children. Because the Rupert books are mentioned as significant in my poetry career, Andrew took time to look them up and saw no dialogue bubbles in the cartoon pictures. Furthermore, being more data driven than I, he came up with a YouTube site for Paul McCartney and Linda Eastman’s Rupert animated film, which I have cited in the text. I hope you enjoy the 13-minute cartoon.]
The name “poet” I wear as a practitioner but not an ambitious known person with collections of published poems. Naïve is what I am, not yet baptized in ink. If most of our Woonian friends who write about their introduction to poetry and verbal arts thought back to the beginning of childhood, they would recognize, if they were lucky, that it was largely an oral world of listening to parents babble in baby sing-song voices, to “Hush Little Baby” lullaby songs, to Mother Goose rhymes and repetitions, and not to forget Five Little Piggies tactility. Of course, we each contributed to the babble by inventing “ma-ma-ma” and “da-da-da.”
To talk of later overtures to the writers, famous poets who came our way, the rise of intellect through school days, when a serious interest might have set in, was probably the time. We have a poem and drawing on our fridge by my son, Andrew, when he was about 8 or 9 and it has never been off the fridge these 40-odd years. He counts that as his earliest poem.
Though I couldn’t possibly remember the first time I wrote anything loosely poetic, I know my mother and grandmother read children’s comics to me: subscriptions were: The Dandy, The Beano, and The Eagle, featuring “Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future.” Most memorable as oral and visual learning experience were comics and books of Rupert (Bear) and his friends. (Published by Daily Express Newspapers.) These were graphic and literary stories, many pages long, four cartoon graphic pictures per page. The paper was thick newsprint, with coloration by printed four-color pointillist dots. The head of the page on top line was the title of the continuing story. Three kinds of “telling” were available. Beneath each colored 4”x 4” picture was a two-line italic verse in rhyme describing the action in the scene. Below the pictures were two columns of longer prose description in two or three sentences, enhancing the message of the verses. Quite a variety of forms for a children’s book. The pictures were worth investigating and describing; poetic couplet was often charming; the prose passage was not important for adding details but good for practicing words and for teaching reading. In fact, the story could be totally appreciated through reading the prose segments. Each graphic picture was colored and frozen in just one gesture, and no speech bubbles were employed, allowing for the child’s imagination to question and decipher the meaning. I did learn by being made to read the poetic lines after my mother had gone over them. The prose had a much larger font-type than the small Italics font of the verse. These comic books were annuals also, a bumper crop of Rupert stories, and without doubt my first awakening to poetic reading beyond Mother Goose and nursery rhymes.
[Paul McCartney and his wife Linda produced a 13-minute video of Rupert in the cave of the frogs, for which Paul McCartney composed the frog song about standing together for protection of their species. Called home by his mom’s holler, Rupert cannot wait to tell of his secret adventure, another wonderful day of a young boy-bear’s discovery out in nature See Rupert And The Frog Song – We All Stand Together.]
Later, when I matured into juvenile, studious consciousness, the beginnings of serious poetry begin. From my trips to Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, Scotland on New Year’s holidays, more important in Scotland than Christmas when I was young, there and then I heard recitations of Robert Burns’s poetry by thick-brogue voices. “Wee sleekit cow’rin’ tim’rous beastie / O, whit a panic’s in thy breastie . . .”. This poetry did not affect me deeply; it was mostly a staple, family entertainment until I chose the books to bring to America when I emigrated in 1958. The collection of Burns’ poems was essential salvage from my parents’ bookshelf. Thereafter, I became enamored of his verse and included lines in my letters to relatives and friends. In high school, I charmed a young girl by reading Scottish poetry when we had picnics in the park. My wife of 60 years, Susan, when we were at university, was won over by my affection for the romantic poetry of Robert Burns and my glee in reading it in the mountain glens of Utah Rockies.
Recently in Iceland, I met a couple of Russian environmental engineers at our Guest House breakfast; at one point I was asked what three aspects of Scotland were my favorite. First was Robert Burns’s poetry; second, the vintage, rickety tram-car public transportation, and third, the annual rebellion, the Rangers v. Celtic New Year’s Football match at Ibrox Park. (This match was emblazoned in my memory by its frightening crowd spectacle of heaving and rowdy drunken men. The game itself was magic; I watched aloft on a tall uncle’s shoulders, to save getting pushed, trampled and squashed). Of the three, it was Robert Burns who attracted the Russian’s attention—”Who was Robert Burns, that poet?” A major voice of Scottish common life. In early life I grew up hearing his poems read or recited in my family, especially on holidays. He was Scotland’s finest poetic mind and artist, a national hero. Everyone knows the verses of “Auld Lang Syne” sung at midnight on New Year’s, even if they have no understanding of the meaning of the poem. Fewer know “Tam O’ Shanter,” “To a Mouse,” or “To a Haggis,” an ode to a Scottish meat dish, recited at Burns’s Suppers the world over on January 26th, the poet’s birthday.
Later in life the study of poetry was for me turned from English and German verse (from school recitations) to Greek and Roman poetry in the ancient languages. Many years came between my English/Scottish verse fascination: marriage, children, and college years intervened. In my return to ancient studies, Homer and Vergil I knew from first readings in Greek and Latin dactylic hexameters. None of the ancient works had I encountered in English first. My college education in Classics was, like tutorials, studying with less than 10 students in universities I attended. Not perhaps unlike poetry courses today, especially in the MFA track or in workshops and Zoom rooms.
When serious choices of interest had to be made, my master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation were metrical studies in the elegiac couplet of Erotic or Amatory literature. Romantic subjects were the focus of the elegiacs. You might say I indulged myself in delightful poetic literature, much lighter fare than serious drama, histories, philosophies, and even long-winded epic literature. Poetry is nowadays my cup of tea, and I know many wonderful minds and get to understand their feelings through hearing and reading poetry with them. I feel fortunate to work with artistic friends to conduct poetry interviews for Radio Tacoma (http://radiotacoma.org/sound-poetry/). Koon Woon is a major influence in my life through his poetry and good conversation. — David Gilmour (9/1/2025)
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