yesterday's poem

was a science poem I wrote in the early 90's before I went to live in an environment that was not friendly to poems. In that life my job was to bring home money.

I never set out to write poems but I had a spontaneous onset of writing poetry after a week of writer's camp. Hearing the readings of a famous poet every daytriggered something in my brain. Centrum had a stellar line up that year with Robert Hass, Jane Miller, Jorie Graham, Jane Hirshfield, and others.

For the first time I fell in love with poetry but I never really got it. I think I experience the poetry well enough but I don't get why we write it. My poetry came on like a tic and I couldn't get rid of it. These lines went through my mind continuously after this workshop. I couldn't refrain from writing them down because that was the only way I could regain dominion over my thoughts. It was like a condition. I wrote down all the lines as they came and when I had enough, I wrote a poem. To write the poems I used a formula. If I can find the formula, I'll post it here.

The next summer I went back to Centrum and met Olga Broumas, in fact was delegated by Centrum to pick her up at the airport and drive her to Port Townsend. She said she liked my poems.

But why do we write them? I know why I'm a nurse. I know what is important about my nursing and nurse practionering. But why poems?

I'd like to get back to them but I've lost my poetry tic and can't break through these questions.

Now I'm so self conscious that writing is creepy. I liked the spontaneous writing that I did.