“Brown”

How I am feeling today: Content

What I am listening to today: The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Are You Experienced?

What I am reading today: Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (J. Scott Bryson)

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Sometimes there are days like today where it feels like being a writer, being a poet, are so intrinsic to your identity that it’s difficult to fathom a time in your life when you were not writing and thinking of the world in terms of narrative (or opening a blog post with such a pretentious first line). Anyway, this morning as I was doing some reading for class planning for the fall, I thought about my own journey as an “artistically-minded” person and when exactly that whole worldview began. Does creativity have a genesis? Well, I do remember being a sophomore in high school and being dumb struck by Fahrenheit 451, especially it’s strange and hopeful ending. This really got me reading and writing (and thinking about what it would be like to be an english teacher) frequently for the first time. I had always been attracted to stories, sure, but never to the extend of my post-451 high school career, when I began consuming novels and poems weekly.

As formative and significant as that moment was for me, that was really more the initial spark of my writerly imagination than the beginning of when I would make things out of nothing. I mean, that wasn’t even when I started writing. The first piece of “proper” writing I ever did was nearly a decade before.

I was one of twenty first-graders huddled together on the unfriendly tile floor of a classroom in Glendora, California in the mid-90s. It was arts and crafts day and everyone was beyond exhilarated and animated; the bowl cuts, the horse girls, the twins in mock turtlenecks, the unkempt kids in over-sized Disney princess T-Shirts and Velcro shoes; even the kid who would walk around pretending to be a cat was mewing. The entire cohort had been gathered around to be given finger paints. But it was more complex than that. We were told to choose a color to finger paint with and then write a poem about the color we chose. We had spent the previous week reading rhyming poetry storybooks. Needless to say, my notes were extensive.

As you might imagine, red was VERY popular. As was blue, among the more pensive children in the class. Yellow also came in as a big hit. Summer, sunshine, school buses; no one was surprised. As with most things, I wanted to take my time and weighed the possibilities. There were only these three primary colors to choose from. I remember feeling confined by my options. Despondent even. They all seemed equally fine colors to me. What about the poem? How could I convey red or blue, or even yellow in a poem? AND it had to rhyme? The pedagogical motivations behind the assignment eluded me.

Unable to make a decision, and with time against me, I took all three colors and combined them. I don’t know what I was expecting. I knew the combinations of any two of them, but all three? Well, as you no doubt know, the result was the color brown. It was a muddy brown, but it was an honest brown. And writing a poem about brown seemed much less daunting a task. After all, brown was familiar, warm. My arms and legs and face were all brown (still are), and I liked the idea of writing a poem about the things I had observed in the world that were also brown. In the midst of the fertile writing process, however, my teacher walked over to check on me. She saw what I had done and (gently) told me that I needed to start over again and choose one of the primary colors. I was a shy boy who abhorred conflict, but also not one to be mismanaged, so I nodded, smiled, got up from my seat and walked over to another part of the classroom to finish my poem.

The original titled was “The Love-Song of N. Dante” but the teacher requested I change it and edit the body of the poem from thirteen pages to one. So I settled on the title, “Brown”. Below is that very poem. My first written poem and first published (and only laminated). Harold Bloom once remarked that it, “brings together the ecstasy and the ennui of a six year old boy on the precipice of the twenty-first century and the loss of his own innocence”. Please enjoy.