My Tenth Grade Poetry Story
There was a time in my life when I felt very certain that it was my destiny to be the first Rimbaud to come out of White Bear Lake Minnesota.
My poetry was pretty much crap, and while I cannot remember much of it now, the fragments that I can are quite awful. So I don’t think about it all that often.
My only love has left me
My only love has gone
Bereft me of what gently
I laid my love upon
Besides the sheer horror of the verse, the reason I apparently remember this rhyme is because of the incorrect usage of the word bereft. As pointed out by a teacher. Oh yes, I showed these things to another person. I had no shame.
In retrospect, perhaps the funniest thing was that I was also kind of a little computer nerd. And since we owned a primitive Atari computer (complete with fancy dot matrix printer), I kept my poetry stored as text files on the computer. I would print out about a dozen at a time, and meticulously assemble books from them. Really, I was thinking of them as musical albums, since I inevitably selected a dozen for each, and they sounded eerily similar to some Doors albums. I probably had six or seven by the end of the summer of 1988.
As far as I can honestly remember, I burned them all in a fit of poetic catharsis that very likely some rock star had done in a book I read. And unfortunately I was not keeping regular backups of my data in those days, so the text files are long gone.
