mIEKAL aND was the first poet I met in person, sUMMER of lOVE 1977 style. For me, poetry, reading and writing, has never been the same. My life has never been the sAME.
We were 19, he working at a Wisconsin Rapids paper mill, I avoiding work in one of hometown Manitowoc's factories (two stints at Mirro Aluminum already under my belt). I shoe-horned into a busy one bedroom apartment on 8th Street Wisconsin Rapids, sleeping on the living room floor for the better part of the summer, doing dishes, doing whatever to sustain the warm welcome I received from mIEKAL and kEN and kENT. (What a glorious summer of lOVE indeed! I met me wife of 25 years, Laurie Schneider, in that crowded living room!)
Until I met mIEKAL, poetry was something I did by myself and for myself, writing for no audience outside my family, reading what no one else around me was reading. Before meeting mIEKAL, following a forgettable high school career (graduating 549 out of 611, gpa of 1.79), I gorged on Hemingway, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Tennyson, Fitzgerald, Sexton, Hugo, Snyder, and others I found in Manitowoc's superb public library or the one bookstore on S. 8th Street. Yet I had no iDEA!
Meeting mIEKAL a mere thirty years ago dropkicked me smack into the terror and pleasure of pursuit of something, something, without a knowable end, with only a tenuous present/presence. Poetry was jolted from solitary practice once and for all into intensive interaction between/within selves, through and through language. Meeting mIEKAL meant pOETS, pEOPLE, pUBLISHERS, bOOKS, rEADINGS, mAGAZINES, mAIL aRT, cOLLABORATIONS, communities, websites, listservs, blogs, ...
mEETING mIEKAL's been/is mEETING cONSTANT pOTENTIAL. I hope you have met or will meet someone who blasts you permanently off your foundations.
Posted by: maria damon | July 30, 2007 at 07:09 AM