Persistence and Patience

Guest blogger, Kathleen Kirk

I grew up on poetry, the sweet rhyming poetry of childhood. My mother read it to me from The Golden Book of Poetry, among other anthologies for children. Then she waited patiently for it to take, for me to grow up and be a poet.

Probably this was not a conscious plan or hope. Probably she just needed us kids to go to bed and read us lilting poems to lull us to sleep. Think “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” by Eugene Field, which begins:

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe—
Sailed on a river of crystal light,
Into a sea of dew.

But I took those rhythms and that rhyme into myself, breath and heartbeat, the basics of poetry, and I am a poet today.

I am still a poet because of patience and persistence. I tried other things, all of which trained me and deepened me as a poet. I took piano lessons, learning to read music, to measure rhythms, to play by heart. I still play for pleasure, but I did not have the discipline or mathematical vision to make a profession of music.

I drew pictures, learned to look and really see, to make the same shapes I saw in the world appear on the page. My mother has kept a letter she sent my grandmother that is a series of pictures by what must be the five-year-old me, amazingly precise and detailed, with volume and perspective, and captions by my mother. I had taught myself to read, because I loved those bedtime stories and poems, but I could not write much, so I wanted to draw pictures and dictate what was happening in them for my mother to write down! I am amazed to see this evidence now of what appears to be true artistic talent. But the very next summer of childhood my parents sent me to an art class, to encourage my budding art ability, and I was too young, too intimidated by the teacher and the older students, to stick with that.

I tried acting, having fallen in love with theatre, my dad a college drama professor who took me to plays—my first, The Miracle Worker, by William Gibson, the amazing story of Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan. Helen, blind, deaf, and dumb, who learned to shape letters in her Teacher’s hands, to communicate, to express herself with the magic of words! Annie Sullivan certainly had patience and persistence, and I learned that lesson young.

I worked in the professional theatre for ten years, immersing myself in various characters, many of them Shakespearean, learning language and empathy from the best. My first poetry chapbook, Selected Roles (Moon Journal Press, 2006), emerged from my work in the theatre. I began to find my voice by speaking in the voices of many characters and personas.

But I did not have the patience and persistence to stick it out in that competitive world, neither lucrative nor glamorous if you are a stage actress not interested in making commercials, and not realizing that a good day job would, indeed the cliché, be waiting tables for the excellent tips! No, I was always drawn to libraries and colleges for my day job, so I always worked for minimum wage by day, and nothing or next to nothing, in the theatre, by night.

My dad, a real drama king, had said to me, “If there’s anything else you can do, do it!” as he knew acting would be a hard life. It was, and I could. I went back to school and became a college professor. But not for long. Well, for a dozen years or so. But, in the scheme of things, when one hopes to write an immortal poem, that’s not very long, after all.

So now I work in a bookstore and write. With my writing, I have been patient and persistent. I am still at it. I have published two more poetry chapbooks—Broken Sonnets and Living on the Earth—both with Finishing Line Press, both finalists, awarded with publication, in their annual contests. I send my work out relentlessly to literary magazines.

I get rejected, accepted, and published all because I am patient and persistent. I have lived through various “trends” in writing, waiting patiently until the thing I do can be appreciated and accepted once again. Beauty has gone out of fashion, and come back. “Nature poems” have been despised, but now everyone is “going green.” Some people equate simplicity of language with simplistic thought, and thus ignore me, while I have always found that the most complex thinking usually requires the greatest clarity of statement. I am not a flashy poet, nor a trendy or political poet. I write about what goes on around me, and inside me.

Paul Auster has said, “Becoming a writer is not a ‘career decision’ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.” I am committed to walking this long, hard road and have been on it, in my meandering way, for quite a lovely while.

Kathleen Kirk writes about what people are reading at her blog, Wait! I Have a Blog?!, which she created accidentally, while trying to comment on somebody else’s blog. You can click on some of her online poems there, or find them online or in print at Apparatus, Leveler, Common Review, Greensboro Review, Oklahoma Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. She has been on the editorial staff of Poetry East and RHINO Magazine, and she has meandered her way into Babbitt’s Books, a vintage bookshop with a fabulous poetry collection. Her books can be had via Babbitt’s, Amazon, Goodreads, and Finishing Line Press.

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