Posted April 11, 2003

I knew I wanted to write before I had anything to say.

So when, as a junior in high school, I got a chance to join a college poetry workshop, I went.

It was helmed by an enthusiastic grad student I'll call Gary. We got a nice sized group the first, six or eight equally enthusiastic students, myself the only one not in college. The thrust of the sessions intimidated me. We were going to work together, encouraging each other to write - I liked that part - and then we were going to give a public reading of our best work. I joined, telling myself I didn't have to perform if I didn't want to.

I don't remember what we did at the meetings. I remember feeling that several of the other participants were much too deep for me. Too deep, or just maybe perhaps, that little critic inside me piped up, too self-absorbed.

I remember two of the other poets clearly. The first was a girl I'll call Jane. She had one poem, that consisted of the word 'no' repeated twenty times. Gary was wild about it.

I wasn't impressed. I don't think I'd said 'no' when it mattered that many times in my life up to then. Jane read it beautifully, each repetition charged with a different meaning. But how would anyone else know how to read it?

Maybe it was a performance piece, not a poem. Maybe sometimes what we have to say can't be put on paper. I wish I could hear it again, now, having refused so much, and accepted so much I wish I'd refused. Then I sniffed, with the Devil in Kipling's "Conundrum of the Workshops," "It's pretty. But is it Art?"

Two meetings stick in my mind. One night the group got off to a late start. There were protests against the Vietnam War that night, and Gary had been delayed when he ran out of gas on his way into town. He was shaken, not only by the annoyance, but by the experience of carrying a can of gasoline through a potentially explosive confrontation of protestors and police.

We decided to move the meeting to his apartment. I don't remember if we ran over our time in the room and the janitors chased us out, if we were simply fired with enthusiasm in planning the actual staged reading for the next meeting, or if we had the sense we were born with and were uncomfortable on campus.

Did I call my parents to tell them I'd be home late? Of course not.

I'll never forget how angry they were when I finally turned up on the night when a riot broke out where they thought I was!

Jim also has a memory of that evening, or a similar one that troubled year. His bedroom was on the second story of his parent's house several blocks from campus, and at least one night he smelled the fragrance of tear gas wafting through his window.

The reading itself has stayed with me. I'm not sure what I read. But Jane had taken me under her wing and encouraged me to go through with it, and Gary had assured me that the footlights would blind me and I'd feel like I was all alone in the room. I didn't believe him, but it was true. I looked up earnestly as I read, and I couldn't make out a single face, I was dazed by the glare of footlights through which the polite applause came as a bewildering shock. I stumbled offstage, trembling with stress but feeling as though I'd passed through an initiation.

Jane surpassed herself. The audience beyond the footlights, sensed, but not seen, brought out a depth and intensity to her performance, as if she felt herself at the service of her muse - or perhaps as if her muse was fully at her service at last. The applause for her was more than polite.

I never saw Gary or Jane again, but I met Patrick at that workshop.

He was a melancholy, intense young man, on the rebound from a broken heart and flinging himself into art for consolation. I recognized him when I found Chesterton's "Ballad of the the White Horse" in the description of Colin: "The Great Gaels of Ireland/ Are the men that God made mad;/ For all their wars are merry, /And all their songs are sad."

I was writing lyric poetry at the time and aspiring to undertake a short story. He was engaged in a work of epic proportions.

An epic, to be precise, written in epic alliterative verse.

I was awed and enchanted. I don't think I'd heard of alliterative verse before. I'd found my roots in Kipling, and was proud of their antiquity. Patrick's went back to Beowulf.

Well, it turned out, not to Beowulf exactly. To the Volsunga Saga - the Nibelungenlied - Wagner. Had I heard of Wagner? I had by the end of the first workshop meeting!

I owned an Ormandy record with "In the Steppes of Central Asia" on it, a Sibelius symphony, a copy of Ormandy's Carmina Burana. I was a high school kid, who read above her grade level and had trouble making friends. I'd read Padraic Colum's "Children of Odin" in Jr. High, and I vaguely remembered finding Siegfried in it.

"I love Classical music and Norse Mythology!" I told him. "Why don't you bring some over?"

If memory serves he brought the whole Ring Cycle over the first day, 18 or 20 vinyl records in album boxes with wonderful covers, box after box emerging from the army surplus backpack stuffed to bursting with dreams.

I don't remember if we made it through Rheingold that day, or if he played me bits and pieces of the whole cycle. We listened to them all, eventually. All of them in recordings by several different conductors, as a matter of fact. Not content with that, we also, over the years, saw all 4 operas at the Lyric in Chicago, and shared a few more live performances and innumerable recordings.

More than that, Patrick has been my loyal audience over the years, staying with me until I found I had something to say and beyond that point; and as his interests have turned toward scholarship, I've grown in his wake.

I don't remember how it began. An ad in the DE? An announcement in English class? But with that tenuous beginning, in the wake of Gary's enthusiasm, we began a lifelong friendship.

Truer words were never spoke than John Hartford's "I wouldn't be here if I hadn't been there, and I wouldn't've been there if I hadn't just turned..."

By Ruby Jung. Background by www.starshinesoftware.com. All rights reserved.