Poetry is my first true love.
I was 12 years old when I discovered it, living in a residential home for children in Pasadena called Hillsides. My father had killed himself two years before—strung himself up by his own trousers in the drunk tank of the Monterey City Jail on a night in late July. This was alright with me at the time. He was terrifying. About two and a half years before that my mother took me to see her own psychiatrist because she felt that my distractible high energy was unnatural for an 8 year old boy. Her psychiatrist was more than happy to prescribe medication for me, Riddlin, which was the official start what became several years of psychiatric care and institutionalization. A few years before this, about two or three months into 1st grade, I was placed in special education because I followed my father’s example of anger management and threw my desk toward the teacher.
That day marked the end of my education. I never saw a regular classroom again.
Still, with the help of my sister, who is 4 years older than myself, I managed to learn how to read about the various things in the world that terrified me. I lived out my entire childhood in terror. The man who was supposed to be my protector and guide was in fact a terrorizing monster who constantly had strange women in the house to satisfy his second major addiction. For some reason I projected my tremendous fear of him onto everything else—Earthquakes, plagues, floods, tidal waves, tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes, meteors, planetary realignment, a new ice age, the sun going supernova and black holes in space sucking the earth into oblivion, just to name a few.
My sister, bless her soul, took advantage of the Worldbook Encyclopedia that happened to be in the household to sit me down and teach me as much as she could about all the things that terrified me until I went to live with my mother as an 8 year old.
Did I fail to mention that my father asked for a divorce the second my mother told him she was pregnant with me? Yes, well they were divorced and separated by the time I was born. I am told that I spent my first 6 months on an iron lung and the next year and a half beyond that with my mother, who passed her time drinking hard liquor and smoking, too drunk to remember where she left me. She eventually came around enough to seek recovery for herself, but passed me off to my father before doing so, which I suppose was the right thing to do at the time. I was 2 years old when I moved in with my father.
My father was as progressed in his disease of alcoholism by the time I was 8 years old as my mother had been when I was 2. However, my mother was now a recovering raging dry alcoholic rather than a "wet" one, like my father still was. She felt she had more to offer me than my father did at this point, which is probably the case, and I was moved back in with her.
So from 1st grade on I spent my days in a classroom with the other "special" children, most of whom wore football helmets to keep them from injuring themselves and plastic bibs to keep as much of their drool as possible from soaking their clothing. There was no real education in these rooms, mostly just funny little puzzles and coloring books.
Up until I moved in with my mother, I spent the days brooding over possible disasters next to the mentally handicapped and my evenings reading up on them with the help of my sister. My sister did a good job teaching me to read. She acclimated me to the use of the dictionary so I could find and eventually understand, through a series of rather elaborated cross-references internal to the dictionary, every unfamiliar word I encountered.
Her kindness saved my life and my soul.
By the time I ended up in the Hillsides residential home for children as a 12 year old, I was finally ready to explore subject matter other than my mind’s worst fears. You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if this had something to do with my father removing the constant looming threat of his existence from my life a few years before.
I didn’t leave the custody of my mother straight for Hillsides. There are quite a few gaps in this story for the sake of brevity. No, first I was institutionalized for six months in the children’s psych ward of the University California Irvine Medical Center. After this I spent two and a half horrifying weeks in the MacLaren Hall juvenile correction center for underage criminals and sexual predators because the State of California had no place to put me as of yet. If I made any progress at all in UCIMC, it was entirely undone with interest during these two weeks. My mother, who had voluntarily signed over her custody of me to the State, did manage to intervene on my behalf, thus getting me placed in Hillsides.
Even in this residential home for troubled children I was placed in the special ed room. It was located on the top floor of the center’s three story administration building. Most of the children went to school every day to a preparatory class that simulated as closely as possible the classrooms of the public school system. A number of children were picked up every day by public school busses. A small handful of children, less than five, went to the top floor of the administration building. Here is where I discovered poetry.
There were a few poetry anthologies on a bookshelf in the long wide room set aside for the most troubled of the troubled children. I didn’t take much interest in them at first, favoring my usual study of geology, meteorology, astronomy, and sporadic dips into geography. The reading materials were scarce, however, and I could not learn anything new about my favored subjects in this environment. Before being sentenced to the custody of the Court, I would purchase books of interest from new and used bookstores. I was pretty enterprising as a free child and managed to strike up business deals between neighborhood adults and myself that ensured a constant trickle of personal income, mostly through landscaping and house sitting. Here in a residential home I had no freedom at all, and I could not get my two hands on anything other than what was around. Eventually I dipped into the few poetry anthologies available and began reading.
I was amazed. These "poems" were nothing like the more technical materials or the stories I had become accustomed to reading. The words in these poems matched in certain ways between lines and read right off the page the way music lyrics sound in song. There were patterns of wordplay that were so intricate in some of the poems that I would spend hours figuring out what the patterns were. Sometimes, when I cracked the code for a particularly complex poem, for instance, like George H. Mile’s "Said the Rose", I would run around showing everyone I could the poem, telling them how incredible it was that such a complex pattern of writing could be accomplished in a way that not only made sense, as if reading prose, but was moving and magical!
I was hooked from that point forward.
The staff at Hillsides made every effort over the next year to bring the urban jungle-boy that I was, who had thus far been completely deprived of a normal education, up to par. They could see that I was possibly intelligent enough to catch up and perhaps even go to regular school in time. They talked to me often of regular school. Two or three times a week I would spend my evenings in a room with a beautiful 20 year old math tutor. My hormones kicked in early, so I was a lost cause, completely unable to focus on subjects so mundane as math when a wonderful smelling beautiful woman was in my presence giving me her undivided attention.
She would try to get me to focus on math and I would try to get her to tell me what she thought of this or that poem that I had recently discovered. I didn’t try my hand at actually writing poems for another two years.
Between my existing mental and emotional issues and the constant ongoing "adjustments" made in the rather large cocktail of psychotropic medications I was forced to take, I eventually ended up institutionalized again, this time in a state hospital. I had spent nearly a year at Hillsides, which was truly a paradise in many respects compared to the life I had lived thus far.
By the time I was placed in Camarillo State Hospital as a 13 year old, I had fixated my attention on the poetry of Robert Service and even memorized a few of his poems, such as "The Quitter" and "The Spell of the Yukon". His poetry was truly inspirational for me as much because of the remarkable schematic structures he adhered to as because of his humor, wit, and imagery. He told gripping stories in ballad verse that took my imagination on such wild rides that I truly felt like I was escaping the curse of my existence for a time.
I saw no poetry in Camarillo. I’m not sure why. It is quite possible that I just forgot about it once I was there. The children’s unit was nestled against the mouth of a canyon at the tail end of a narrow valley. I can’t remember much of my time here, just fragments.
A year later I was released back into the custody of my mother, who was living in a studio apartment in Culver City. In a month or so we moved a few blocks into a one bedroom duplex. I was placed in special ed at the local middle school, once again sharing class with mentally retarded children. In many ways I felt more at home in the mental institutions because I shared my days and nights with other children who suffered from behavioral disorders. From the moment I stepped into the UCIMC psych ward to the moment I left Camarillo State Hospital, I never once shared a classroom with a drooling mentally handicapped child who wore a bib and a football helmet. Now, here I was again right back to square one, as if not a damned bit of progress had been made in all this time.
I had my freedom again, though, and I rediscovered the bookstores and libraries. This time my focus was on poetry. But, as I delved back into reading, I found that my mind was now much slower than before. I could barely pick the print off the page and make sense of what I was reading. Somewhere between 12 and 14, something in my mind had broken. I could no longer read the way I could before.
After a considerable effort, I gave up and more or less stuck to short stories and magazine articles. Within a period of a few months I was beginning to act out my violent, terribly destructive tantrums again, this time as a 14 year old teenager who was considerably stronger than the 12 year old who was originally institutionalized. I was returned to the custody of the Court and institutionalized again, this time in a place called Gateways.
My mother’s psychiatrist of many years presided over the care of the Gateways inpatients, the same psychiatrist who originally put me on Riddlin. My mother had a great deal more opportunity to meddle in the affairs of my care than she did in the two previous places. Somehow this psychiatrist managed to find a cocktail of medication for me that by some miracle kept me from destroying everything in sight when I became agitated. This took close to six months, and I was not yet 15.
From here I was placed in the custodial care of The San Fernando Child Guidance Clinic. I was placed in a home in Granada Hills, which was an actual house in an actual neighborhood that had live-in "house parents". It was in this place that I began to explore the writing of poetry.
I also managed to start reading poetry again, mostly focused on Robert Service. I managed to acquire several books of his poetry, from which I read on a daily basis. Again, the stories were remarkable, told in elaborate alliterative stanzas that used a simple language that only sent me to the dictionary perhaps once or twice every two or three poems.
Life in this residential home was more difficult than it was anywhere else so far. Each of the three sets of house parents who took work-residence there were in their own way pretty dysfunctional. They were always a married couple who were questionably qualified for such a role. The middle set were the least dysfunctional of the three. They actually played a major positive role in my life and I continued to be friends with them for another 7 years. The first and last sets were equally as dysfunctional as my own parents, complete with acting out violently on the children and harsh verbal abuse.
In fact, the abuse from the last set was so severe that I eventually ran away. I decided it made more sense for me to take my chances on the open highways at this point. It would be another 2 months before I turned 16. For over a year and a half I hitchhiked the Western and Midwestern United States as a runaway.
I spent most of my time in public libraries reading books like The Oxford Book of Regency Verse, The Blue Book of Poetry, The Best Loved Poems of the American People, and a great many more. I committed several poems to memory and recited them to the people who picked me up on the highways as I wandered about. I slept either in shelter missions or in a subzero sleeping back a park ranger gave me my third week out as a runaway as I passed through the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona.
Despite my constant reading in libraries as a runaway, I never really studied poetry. Perhaps this is because I never acquired the concept of study as a practice. But I read poetry the way a teenager eats apple pie, by the slice and by the pan, whichever way I could get it. This was my soul food. I had no place to go and all the world to fear, but I drank deep and as often as I could of the crisp old pages of classical poetry. My adolescent vocabulary was shaped by the poetry I read. By the time I was an 18 year old, six months after having contacted the State of California from Salt Lake City, Utah to seek emancipation long distance, I was practically speaking in iambs and archaisms.
The stage was set, I would never fit in anywhere, especially in modern circles of poetry.
As a naïve teenager on the run, I just naturally assumed that the poetry I was finding in sections 811 and 821 of the Dewey Decimal system in the public libraries was both classical and contemporary. Works from writers such as Whitman had no appeal to me because not only did they not make the least bit of sense to me as a teenager, but they lacked any and all poetic structure. Same with writers such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. I read what I was drawn toward as a runaway child on the highways after a life of unspeakable mental and emotional torment, and that was structured poetry.
I needed structure in my mind, to say the least. Now I was in a long-term withdrawal from medications the names of which I am unable to pronounce to this day. I had been forced to take such medication for nearly 8 years. Some of the dosages were extremely toxic. My mind was in absolute chaos, and these incredible, complexly structured poems could withstand the labyrinth of my thought process enough to convey information and meaning to my fragmented psyche.
It was the poetry of Campbell, Coleridge and Dorr that coaxed me from the deepest hells of psychological turmoil, a hell that most couldn’t even begin to imagine. A shattered mind and a broken spirit can barely withstand a harsh word while a clear mind and a strong spirit can potentially withstand vivisection after ten other kinds of medieval tortures without even the slightest bit of mental or emotional torment. I was broken and shattered. I was in hell, a hell that shivers my spine to think on even now.
It was poems like "Sunshine" by Service and "The Two Voices" by Tennyson that somehow gave me something to hold onto throughout it all, that taught me.
These poems created the crescent bark of my hope. The structures in which they were crafted were like the gunwales to which I clung through surge and storm.
Time passed, and I eventually found my way. The story is long and arduous, but by the time I was 24 years old I was working in information technology in the San Jose area. My peak salary was over 80 thousand in a year. I did well, and I proved within myself that I could "succeed" despite the manifold prophesies of failure that were heaped over my head seemingly from day one. The odds were stacked so heavily against me that I quite honestly did not stand a gnats chance in hell, yet I managed to fit in well enough to make a good living, decent friends, and a promising future.
I was always the oddball wherever I worked. I often spoke using words that most people were unfamiliar with because I learned them from classical poetry. As time passed, I acclimated more and more to the types of people I worked with, using their vernacular as best I could. I performed technical services for mainframe computers purchased by multinational corporations who purchased with their systems multimillion dollar service contracts. When there was a problem, I never broke a sweat. I remained friendly and professional with the people I worked with. I found a way to solve each and every problem thrown at me to the satisfaction of the customer. I wrote technical documentation and handled dozens of internal systems and network administrative tasks over the five years I worked in information technologies. I enjoyed myself.
I could have continued on this way until I one day retired, but something was missing. I wanted to write.
When a company I worked for in Ukiah, California folded near the end of 2000 due to the steady collapse of the dot.com industry, I found myself out of work. It would have been no problem for me to find another good job with great pay and benefits, but something was missing. I wanted to write.
Over the course of the preceding two years I had begun to explore writing poetry again. I stopped writing poetry when I moved to Santa Cruz to live out of my car for close to two years as a 22 year old. I had encountered the stream-of-consciousness-symbolist-imagist-just-say-what-you-feel-man-it’s-all-about-love poetry scene, and found myself harshly marginalized as a poet who wished to include prosody in his studies. By the time I was settled in Santa Cruz living in the parking lot of the A&W Restaurant on Ocean Avenue, it had dawned on me that I had fallen in love with a poetry that had for some reason not only been forgotten, but was now zealously rebuked and avoided.
My complete lack of education as a child and teenager and the fact that I was left to read and study whatever drew my interest without mentorship or guidance of any kind had completely ruined me. Now I was an anachronism doomed to a life of literary marginalization. I stand little chance of ever getting my foot in the door to show the English speaking world what I can offer, what has been forgotten and pushed aside with a relentless vigor.
By September of 2001, I had decided to dedicate the rest of my life to the study of poetry. For the past four years I have been doing just that, nearly to the exclusion of all else. The learning handicaps created in me prevent me from being able to focus on a study such as this while at the same time holding a job that required all my time and energy. I had to make a choice, and I made it.
During the past four years I have enjoyed some direction at the behest of two people, one specializing in Western philosophy and thought, the other in Eastern. My studies have been focused on the English language itself, rhetoric, theories of poetry and poetics, prosody, philosophy, world religion and more. I am utterly incompatible with the UC system because of my complete lack of educational preparation and background. After several attempts to involve myself with college environments, I have to admit defeat.
I feel I am beginning to have something to offer through my own studies, but I might as well be stranded on an uncharted desert isle. Cry as I might into the wind and the waves, no-one will hear me. It is like being dead.
I am a rumbling volcano of repressed ideas and insights, spouting off wisps of steam into a cold blue sky.
Please free me.
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