Late last week, I came across a
mini-anthology of poetry which contains my only published poem. It’s the result
of a nine-years-ago contest conducted by our local poetry group. Since it’d
been some time since I’d last looked through the collection, I did so again,
curious to see what names, now familiar these years later, popped out at me.
The name of one local poet did catch my eye—someone whom I’ve wound up getting
to know and spend time with. When I told her about finding the chapbook, and
seeing her three poems in it, she commented that she had a vague recollection
of those poems, and wondered how I relate, now, to my own poem from the
collection. Well, I’d cringed when I reread it—I’d do it so differently, now. And,
as she said about herself, “It was surely another [person] who wrote that.”
I guess it’s a good sign that
something I wrote a little more than nine years ago makes me cringe. I must be
getting somewhere, after all. And maybe I am maturing in my craft. Maybe I’m
maturing as a person, as well.
But let’s not allow my cringing to be the final
word on the matter. For one thing, knowledgeable people decided the poem was
something other than cringy, for they published it. (And in fact, when our local paper ran its article about the collection, mine was one of the three or
four poems mentioned by name.) I wrote the poem to the best of my abilities,
then—just as I currently do, and will continue doing. Hopefully, I’ll be always
improving, always seeing an increase across the years in the caliber of my
writing. In a sense, I’ll forever be the same writer: writing to the best of my
continually increasing ability.
Yet, I’ll also forever be another
writer: changing, improving, building and developing upon what “surely another
person” has done. Whatever greatness I might realize as a writer will be due to
my standing on the shoulders of those other persons.
