My poetry blog comes full circle today with “Professor,” the last Sunday poem that I will post – for the time being, anyway – in the Journal of Radical Wonder. The weekly feature began last April with “Openings,” a poem about a toddler learning to say the word “window” in the crib, and it ends now with a piece about a woman who is past the point of learning new words. No doubt she could if she wanted to, but she is now over eighty and nearing the end of a life spent enlightening others, and her craving for new knowledge is slight. If she is to learn something world-changing, it may require a change to the next world. I am not sure if old age is really like that, but I can guess.
 
Sometimes, as authors, we create characters as cautionary examples. Sometimes, we create them for entertainment or adventure. Other times, we simply craft them as examples of qualities that we like -- an easy enough feat in poetry, which doesn’t require us to test their personalities with a conflict-laden storyline. The title character of “Professor” is one of my personal favorites, and I have no interest in constructing a 300-page novel around her. She is content to stay on the beach. This poem originally appeared in The First Thing Mastered, a chronological collection about the first few decades of life, but it doesn’t appear in a section about old age; the book doesn’t have one. Instead, it’s grouped with the poems about college life and young adulthood. In the context of the book, the protagonist of the poem is not the professor herself, but the undergraduates who seek her attention. It doesn’t matter that they contribute little to the poem themselves. Our life story is a shared one, defined sometimes by our encounters with others, and sometimes we inch out of the spotlight to let older and wiser ones borrow it.
 
If you are a person of a certain age reading this blog, you must have had mentors who inspired you growing up: professors, high school teachers, coaches, maybe even bosses. I had many such people, and as I write this sentence, I hope that at least a few of them will read it. The greatest tribute that I can give them is to show that I absorbed their wisdom. In the case of “Professor,” the title character’s wisdom is simplicity. She is not Charles Foster Kane, dying in a shadowy mansion with “No Trespassing” signs looming on the gates. As death (or at least emeritus status) approaches, she steadily parts with clutter. During her office hours, she no longer meets in an office at all, but lets students seek her out on a bench overlooking the ocean. She is up front about her buck teeth and the scar on her gum; physical beauty no longer matters. A widow, she has stopped driving and recently donated her late husband’s belongings to the Good Will. Even as a professor, she no longer feels the need to prove her astuteness. When students ask her questions, she responds with questions. Like Socrates’ pupils, they can teach themselves the answers.
 
Twice in the poem (quoted in italics, which are less definite), the professor states, I am giving myself back. She wants to leave a small footprint, as we say in modern times. Does that make her selfless? Not at all -- we cannot be selfless by nature. There is an art, though, to projecting a self that is not crass or obnoxious. The professor has worked assiduously at a graceful exit. Perhaps her last incarnation benefits the environment; she seems to use few resources, even as she notes the climate change that has brought up sea levels around her. Perhaps her example inspires students. She certainly will not provide as much work for movers as some of us do upon death. Her one act of true initiative in the poem, in the spirit of Mary Poppins, is to feed the birds. They are excited to see her, and she returns their enthusiasm. Her fingers shake as she opens the Ziploc bag and tosses the crumbs. She wonders if she will get an eternal reward for feeding them. Some of us never stop puzzling about karma.
 
And that is where the poem ends, and also where my year in the Journal of Radical Wonder ends. Years ago, I was grateful for the mentors who helped to give me a voice. Right now, I am grateful for the Radical Wonder staff who have given that voice a platform. Like the professor in my poem, they encourage others to speak for themselves. They believe in the power of wonder. They certainly are not in it for the money. As I write this, the most recent submissions on the website are Tiffany Elliott’s prose poem “Sisterhood,” Margaret Sefton’s short story “Breakthrough Queen.” Read them both. Savor what they have to tell you. Think of them like the crumbs scattered to those birds -- small but fulfilling, a promise of being fed again, an assertion in the face of those rising tides.

My year of blogging is coming to an end. Last year, at the beginning of April, my poem "Openings" appeared in the Journal of Radical Wonder, and I resurrected this blog -- which had been dormant for years -- to write about it. Since then, I have published a new poem every Sunday and added a pair of extra ones around the new year, due to the serendipity of having written three poems that take place on consecutive dates. I cannot thank John Brantingham and the rest of the Radical Wonder staff enough for the opportunity to publish work in a consistent venue, which in turn allowed me to revisit old poems and reflect on the inspiration behind them (and, in some cases, the hindsight that sometimes caused me to read them differently). It has been a year of renewal and discovery, but the time has come to divert my creative energy elsewhere, and so the Sunday poetry blog will go on hiatus at the end of March.

​A few of the poems from Radical Wonder have been new ones. I haven't written much about those on the blog; I get tight-lipped with new pieces, perhaps because I want to let them speak for themselves. With the older submissions, which are now old enough that they feel like the work of a slightly different person, I have had much more to say. As my fellow California poet Paul Kareem Tayyar once put it:

          When it ends the road slips back into what it always was,
          A mirror for the rider to find himself within.

So perhaps this blog has been a mirror. What have I found in it? At the risk of making critical dissertations on myself, I would say that my overriding subject as a poet has been the lives of ordinary people doing the best that they can. The couple in "Last Date Before the Proposal" who carefully scrutinize each other over tea, the parents in "The Girl Concentrates" who buy their daughter a toy space shuttle after a real one explodes on television, the college RA in "Commencement Day" who plans a huge morning prayer and then accepts two people showing up -- they do not always achieve their goals, but they have admirable standards, and life will probably be kind to them eventually. Some of my poems may focus on cruel or indifferent people, but they are in the minority. Most of the protagonists are conscientious, industrious, hopeful, and sometimes a little fretful and hard to please. Of course, that is a perfect description of me. There's your mirror for you.

But the mirror is only one factor here. All of these poems were written by me, but they are written for you. Who are you, exactly? I don't know. I can name a handful of friends and family members whom I can say with assurance will read each new poem, but Christopher Nolan's family and friends undoubtedly go to see his latest movie as well. If we create public art, then we ultimately create it for strangers. A five-star review on Amazon or a royalty check from our publisher alerts us that someone out there has consumed it. Beyond that, the impact of our work is a mystery. Every year, I begin my 6th-grade English class by sharing Stephen King's essay "What Writing Is," in which he compares the connection between a writer and reader to the mythical art of telepathy. If you think about it, his argument makes perfect sense: A writer jots down a set of words in one time and place, and a reader receives it in another. The writer and reader never meet, most likely, but they are on opposite ends of an interaction. In the essay, King gives an example: If he describes a rabbit munching a carrot inside a cage on a table with a red cloth, you will construct that image in your mind, simply because he and you both know what a rabbit, carrot, cage, table, and cloth look like. The writer's audience, ultimately, is any person who knows what the writer is talking about. Perhaps that audience will end up being ten people; perhaps it will be ten million. Perhaps the audience will like the story about the rabbit in the cage; perhaps not. In any case, the connection has been made. One person writes the poem, another reads it, and both look to their respective mirrors.

So here is "Birth," this week's poem in Radical Wonder. (For some reason this morning, Weebly is not letting me embed the link under text, so here is the URL: https://medium.com/the-journal-of-radical-wonder/birth-3f39d9866bfd.) I wrote this poem in 2010, long before I became a parent, but as I look back on it 14 years later, nothing in it seems inaccurate. It is a one-sentence poem built from images that most of us, at least over a certain age, can recognize. The title, first, is straightforward: We all know about babies. Perhaps you have had a newborn yourself, or perhaps you remember your younger siblings or cousins first coming back from the hospital. Even if not, you probably know what a tea kettle is, plus a banister, a mobile, and a newspaper stained with coffee rings. You know the sensation of days that seem to forge their own sense of time, sound that seems soundless, a state of mind that seems both tremendously focused and insanely scattered. The poem begins with the words "This is" before a torrent of nouns. When you start a poem with "This is," you obviously assume that the reader knows what you're talking about. I must have felt that way in 2010.

​Writing is a remarkable invention. I remind my students of that. Thousands of years ago -- not a particularly long time in the scheme of history -- humans developed a system of making marks on a flat surface and having them mean something. We use those marks for all different purposes, but when it comes to poetry or fiction or philosophy, my own belief is that the ultimate benefit of writing is to remind us that we're not alone. We get plenty of empathy from those telepathic voices, and sometimes they just remind us not to give up. So, if you're reading this latest poem between shifts of caring for a newborn, take it from me that the house will tidy itself before long and you'll eventually get your sleep back. And congratulations on your growing family.

I don't miss the days of seeking romantic partners on Craigslist, but I sometimes recall with fondness -- or at least mordant humor -- the insights into human nature that I found there. We are a notoriously needy species, and rarely do our needs stand naked more than when we lay out our criteria for soulmates. One day, scrolling the list of postings, I found one by a woman seeking "Tall Native American Guy Who Likes Punk Rock." Leaving aside the odds of finding a man who met that exact fetish, I wondered if, in the event that the author got lucky, she would find herself marginalized by his own forbidding standards. Suppose there was a tall Native American guy out there who liked punk rock and who was actively seeking a petite Mongolian woman who liked 1940s ballads. Would they still be compatible even if they didn't live up the other's ideals for height, race, and musical acumen?

I will never know. I do know, however, that I once miserably failed a stranger's test on Craigslist, and the tragic flaw turned out to be my height: The post's author listed an extensive series of desirable qualities in a partner, and her list read like an intimate friend's description of me. Then, at the bottom, she added that she was 5'8" -- same as me -- and that she would not accept any partner who was not taller than her. I responded to her and asked if she could settle for a partner who, pun intended, saw perfectly eye to eye with her. She didn't reply.

Our lives are our art, but we don't always approach them like painters or novelists. Sometimes, we work like casting directors. Think back on your own life and count the significant people who weren't imposed on you by family or other inevitable circumstances; chances are that they'll make up the vast majority. In the sandbox at preschool, we choose the other toddlers to play with. As childhood goes on, we choose friends and then choose groups, not necessarily in that order. Eventually, many of us choose a partner to live with. Our criteria may be less silly than demanding tall Navajos who relish the Sex Pistols, but we have criteria nevertheless. My poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, "Last Date Before the Proposal," is about two prospective spouses who are auditioning each other for a part. I wrote this poem more than a decade ago, and it is one that I am particularly proud of, because I have not outgrown it since then. "Love's no romance," Paul Simon once sang. There are definitely such things as love and romance, but they only sometimes intertwine. This poem is about the business end of love. That's not what we pine for on Craiglist, but it's worth asking the tall Native American guy about his credit history and willingness to do the dishes.

"Last Date Before the Proposal" is from The First Thing Mastered, which covers the first three and a half decades of life in chronological order. It comes near the end, with a number of giddier poems before it. As a poet, I have always had a hard time with romance; maybe it requires a surrender of gravity that I have trouble achieving. Maybe Shakespeare and Neruda and the other masters have just said it better than I could. No matter. "Last Date Before the Proposal" is not romantic, but it is about love, and not in a cynical or dismissive way. The characters at the heart of the poem love each other, deeply, and they are asking all the right questions about it. Have they been married already? Maybe; I intended the line "Each of us has been here before" to be ambiguous. Perhaps "here" just means in a state of contemplation, or perhaps they are thinking of their last date in the same location. The pair talk about the films of Akira Kurosawa, but loving his films is not a prerequisite for marriage; the man simply notes that the woman praises them for their humanistic quality. That must mean that she is a good person. If they agree on humanism, then they may grant themselves different tastes in movies or music. What is more important is his hand -- how he keeps it steady, how it is gentle enough to hold the wine glass. Perhaps she has known a more volatile hand in the past.

Love has so little to do with wine. It has so little to do with Kurosawa, or punk rock, or so many other arbitrary things. It is a commitment that is one part bliss and a large part selflessness, collaboration, and responsibility. After being married for twelve years, I would like to think that I know that. The characters in "Last Date Before the Proposal" know it too. We never find out how they fare as a married couple, but we never find out the same about Romeo and Juliet. May they find happiness of the rational kind. The poem ends with a line that I wouldn't have written when I was a few years younger: "We part with a handshake, disguised as a kiss." Shaking hands is one way of holding them. That's what you get for your beautiful ring.

My entry this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder is another new piece, "A Defense of Amateur Sleuthing." I wrote this one after reading an article in the Los Angeles Times by Megan Abbott titled "Why True Crime Calls to Women." (That was the headline in the print edition; it has a different one online.) You may read the article here and the poem here.

Thanks, as always, to John Brantingham and the rest of the Radical Wonder staff for their support.

"Child Shrieking Over a Burst Balloon," a never-before-published poem that I wrote a couple of years ago, appears today in the Journal of Radical Wonder. This poem may find its way into a future collection, or it may simply be a stand-alone piece. In any case, as the title indicates, it's incredibly sad. I have never learned not to wince at the sound of a crying child.

Now is a good time to change the subject, so here are two other recent notable pieces in Radical Wonder:

The other day, a new poem by Tamara Madison -- a writer whom I have long admired, and who was once the online Poet of the Month for Moon Tide Press -- went up on the site. It's called "Give Me Your Clouds," and it reminds me of a favorite piece by D.H. Lawrence, "Craving for Spring," in which the author passionately implores the new season to arrive. Check out Lawrence's piece here, and then see if you detect a similar tone in Madison's:

Give me your clouds
Your big clouds rising like cakes in the oven
Blue clouds heavy-bottomed, looming
High clouds scratched by wind
Clouds like a sun-bleached spine
I want white clouds billowing up
with a narrow sword-gray cloud
ripping through the middle...

Also worth a read is Lavina Blossom's "Holding," which the poet describes as a response to a writing challenge in which she took vocabulary from the first and last lines of a poetry collection (Elizabeth Cantwell's Nights I Let the Tiger Get You) and worked them into an original piece. I haven't read Cantwell's book, but the poem that Blossom wove out of it is quite beautiful, and I give her full permission to use any of my books as her next raw material.