TIRP #2

Three semesters ago, in the fall of 2014, I enrolled in my first poetry workshop. By nature I am quiet and prone to being an introvert so I reasoned with myself that, since workshops essentially require the student to both speak and receive constructive criticism, that it would be a good class to take. The fact that I hadn’t really tried my hand at poetry before didn’t bother me so much. My instructor was Christopher Mink, and he was incredibly passionate about poetry and this translated into me being inspired to do well in the class, since I have a theory that if the teacher is passionate then the students will follow suit. As it turned out, my classmates, even the self-professed total strangers to poetry, were all invested in the course. Our workshops were productive; we shared our thoughts and read one another’s poetry and that of some pretty great authors as well. I enjoyed this the most because it afforded me the opportunity to speak. Throughout the course, my classmates and I composed five poems. For myself, the most personal and emotional poem was my third. The assignment was to write a poem from another’s point of view. As I thought on this assignment, I was called back again to the Patricia Bizzell article William Perry and Liberal Education. In her article, she writes about William Perry’s three world views: Dualism, where there is only right and wrong; Relativism, where selfish interest motivates decisions; and Commitment in Relativism, where priorities from social surroundings take precedence. It was this third world view that I was operating under when I chose the speaker for my poem, and it just so happened that turned out to be my mother. According to Bizzell’s article, a committed relativist wants to work productively in their chosen field. By this stage in the semester, I had become aware that I wanted to write poetry well after the course had ended and as I progressed in the course, I wanted to write something that pushed me out of my comfort zone and reveal something about my families past. When I was in high school, my mother revealed to me that her father had been physically abusive to her and her 9 other siblings, mother and aunt. From the stories I heard, and then heard again from my grandmother years later, the man had a monster living inside of him. The most difficult part of the assignment was trying to enter the mindset of a person who had to live with a parent behaving in that way. It was hard, and I had to let my imagination go a little bit when writing the poem, told from the point of view of my nine year old mother after she had drawn watch duty for my grandfather’s arrival home. For my part, I had already been convinced that writing was an excellent way to express myself creatively but this assignment allowed me to connect writing to my family’s history, no matter how dark. This poem, which I titled “The Afternoon Watch” was the first poem that I submitted to be published. It didn’t happen, but with the fact that (according to my mother and a few aunts and uncles) I was able to have the confidence in my writing to make that move.