To Jack Myers Reading Robert Creeley in Creative Writing Class

The first time I saw Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of The Metro” on the blackboard in English class my junior year of high school, I was stunned. You can write like that? I thought. Just that? This isn’t tennis without a net; this is high wire walking without a net. Nothing is safe and everything hangs in the balance.

I wanted that life.

I make it to Jack’s Introduction to Poetry Class at SMU. I’m a freshman and think I have finally come to meet my fate: this is where the real work happens and Jack is so clearly the teacher. He seems cranky, but only for a second. He has a beard and a cigarette all the time. He says things like, “for cryin’ out loud” and I can still hear how his hand would softly land on the desk when he ended a sentence.

Jack Myers
http://www.smu.edu/News/2009/jack-myers-dmn-30nov2009

Mostly, he read to us. Poem after poem after poem, he would stand, a little tilted, a little slumped to one side, with his hand his pocket. One day, he read Mark Strand’s “Keeping Things Whole” and he got two lines in and took his hand out of his pocket and began to punctuate the lines, slightly, more like he was playing an instrument than reading a poem. I heard that poem the way I saw Pound’s poem and again I wanted that. Whatever life one has to live to get to the moment when I sit down and write something like that.

And then, one spring day, he brought out Robert Creeley. He may have slipped and called him Bob. And again Jack gets up and again he plays along as he reads and again he shifts from side to side as the lines move him and he just keeps reading poem after poem.

“For love--I would/split open your head…”

“Pain is a flower like that one/like this one/ like that one/like this one.”

“As I sd to my/friend, because I am/always talking…”

Jack smiles at the end of each one. Class dismissed. As if we can just walk out of the room. As if  the magnolia trees aren’t drunk again. As if this day wasn’t created out of nothing. As if the steps down Dallas Hall don’t lead to another life that I have to go live now. A life with lines like this in it.

Before that day, I thought simple meant easy, but after that, I realized simple was the hardest thing to write.

The last line haunted me all day: “drive, he sd, for/christ’s sake, look/out where yr going.”