Portraits Painted by Hand

My daughter, Hannah, found a book of poetry I wrote while I was in college for an eclectic group of kindred souls. That book, typewritten, pages faded yellow, red covers bound with a shoestring, has been part of our family for longer than Hannah's entire life. She's read every poem out loud and called our attention to the handful she thinks are my best work from the hundred or so.

I originally titled it Portraits Painted by Hand (Of Friends and Memories Held Dear). At least that's what the title page says (and you can see the cover at right). Over the years, it's become "in case of a fire, save that book" to my family.

I love poetry and once had ambitions to be a professional poet, until I discovered I'd make pennies per poem … I never submitted any to be published.

Well, actually, what I found was that I could make living wages writing prose—as in articles for daily newspapers, corporate communications, marketing/sales collateral, and websites. Most of my poetry was written before I attended journalism school and learned to write in the Associated Press style, from which I've never really recovered.

Many of the ideas came during my college and semi-professional career, when I drove hundreds of miles a week, usually at night. I'd turn off the car radio and let my mind drift. Sometimes, I'd get a flash of a verse, or even just a catchy line, and work on it in my head for miles. As rhymes jelled, I wrote them by dashboard light on a notepad I always kept in the car. Then I'd work the next verse or the next rhyme, and write it down when it felt good.

After I got home, I reworked the poems, over and over, until they touched me, or made me laugh. Then I tested them against the "gang"—the group of poets I hung out with at Green River College. If my friends liked them, I typed them and bound them into the little red book.

If the group didn't like a poem, I disassembled it and stored the ideas in a large loose-leaf notebook with other things that never quite came together. I dipped into that scrape pile a number of times during the ten years between high school graduation and marriage and found ideas that worked in other poems. Unfortunately, the notebook was lost years ago, along with my autographed copy of Frank Herbert's Dune, and most of my newspaper clippings.

When I started writing professional as a reporter and editor, I neglected my poetry until my skills atrophied. As a working man, and a family guy, I don't drive much at night anymore, so I don't get the sort of inspirational time alone I once had. I've tried to write poetry since, but never had the same sense of freedom and satisfaction.

Hannah liked my poetry well enough to want to use it for her high school classes, readings, and drama tryouts. Ever the doting parent, I typed a few as gifts for her … and she typed a few as gifts for me. The rest were scanned in (please forgive any OCR-induced typos I haven't yet caught). We discovered that HTML is not conducive to poetic formats, so the visual clues (indents and such) were left off.

The shoestring binding of the red book came from the three years I spent working for the Washington State Senate. We tied legislative bills into bill books using shoestrings through grommets in imitation cordovan covers. When the legislative sessions ended, they threw away those makeshift archives and reprinted the bill activity in professionally-bound volumes.

I saved two of those castaway back covers and stored my poetry between them. It's been more than 25 years, and the covers (and shoestrings) are still holding up well. Hannah thinks the poetry is, too.

Editor's update: As I work on the scanned poems and write new ones, I find the vision I had 25 years ago is not the same as my vision now. The poems were fine back then but I see how to make them better.