Nantucket Poetry Workshop and "Beads"

I cannot recall a summer that I have not spent on Nantucket. I have always loved coming here, but in recent years I began to feel disconnected from the island. The fact that I lived here for over two months and really did not have any ties to the community unsettled me. Last summer I began to work in a store downtown and have met many new people who have strong ties to the island and I now feel more like I belong here, that I am not just a tourist grazing the beaches and the restaurants for a short summer vacation.

This summer I wanted to try even more things that would connect my to the island. I looked at posters on street corners and coffee shops for interesting things to do and I came across one for a poetry workshop led by the UVA professor and published poet Gregory Orr. The flyer said the workshop was free to both teens and adult. At the end of the four weekly sessions there would be a reading in the atheneum. I am always willing to hear feedback, "go to a poetry reading" was on my summer bucket list, and I thought maybe I could meet some people who were interested in some of the same things as me. So, I thought "why not?".

Let's just say that I was the only "teen" there. Actually, I think I was the youngest one at the workshop by at least a decade or two. I got some pretty strange looks when I went to the first meeting. Most of the people sitting around the circle I could tell were locals. And some of their poems revealed that they had endured through some pretty rough winters cooped up in the moors. So, I wouldn't exactly call my experience fun, but I continued to go because I knew I would regret it if I didn't.

Last night was the poetry reading. I drove into town way too early and walked around the block twice, afraid to go inside the library and be forced to talk to people a generation (or two...or three) ahead of me. I almost didn't go, but I knew I would regret it if I didn't. I hadn't exactly talked very much (or at all) at the workshops and I wanted to read my poem aloud to show everyone that "that young quiet girl" doesn't write poems half-heartedly, that she actually came to learn.

So I went. And it wasn't bad! Some people had come just to hear the poetry, and I think a few were so old that they fell asleep during the reading and began to drool on their sweaters. But I actually talked to some of the people there before the reading began and was quite inspired. I love hearing about the lifestyle of people who live here all year long. Many have interesting pasts. Greg also read some of his own poetry. I am ashamed to admit I never read one of his poems prior to last night but I was extremely moved by what I heard, especially the heart-wrenching eulogy to his younger brother who tragically died in a hunting accident, as well as his poem "To Be Alive", which he deems his "theme song".

Overall, I am glad I went through with the workshop. I didn't exactly make any new friends but I was truly inspired by some of the things I heard and now feel more motivated to experiment with poetry.

This is the poem I read last night at the reading. I like to think of it as a bit or a surrealist poem, one with exotic and possibly disturbing imagery. The structure of the third part was influenced a great deal by Allen Ginsberg's "Howl". I felt a little strange reading this aloud to a crowd of people who wrote poems that metaphorically compared their enemies to bugs, romantically described a dying lover, and reflected on a personal journey in the Buddhist faith. I hope no one was scarred (although one man did read a poem called "Whale Song", a poem describing a whale's tossing and moaning in the ocean, which he later revealed was actually about having intercourse with his lover).

Beads

I.            You had the answers long ago

You held them in your hands

And let them brush the skin between your fingers

The way cool fringe feels lining a pillow’s edge

Watch as one roles back and forth along your knuckles

While your naked skin bathes in the lush grass unashamed

Adorned in beads of dew

II.            The day we discovered we did not know

            Was the day we fell to earthly strife

            Without warning our fingers began to bleed

            Crimson concentrate trickling down to our scabby little elbows

            Dripping from palms marked by the star of that righteous stigmata

            The serpent’s four fangs sank into the webbed flesh between our fingers

            Like tiny keys fitting into tiny locks

            Turning out logical sacrifices for future sinners of future generations

            As darkness and light charged over the horizon           

III.            “He made me do it” we scream through hysterical tears as we buckle over at the waist

            Waiting to feel the next blow straight to the gut

            “He made me do it” we scream trying to ignore the frantic pulse of our swollen backs

            Scourged by holy flames borrowed from Hell

“He mad me do it” we scream as our mothers lie naked and exposed on tabletops withering in pain

The subject of clammy plastic gloves about to be burdened with another demanding life

            “He made me do it” we scream like the brothers whom we stalk through view finders dodging patriotic bullets

            Across borders and oceans and prehistoric values

            “He made me do it” we scream into empty nights conquered by insomniacs tracing cosmos and constellations and Wall Street prophecies

            “He made me do it” we scream as we are forced to march with hands tied behind our backs with rusty chains

            Led by a prison angle out the door incrusted in wilted ivy