I was going to be a poet. Even now I want to scan that line. Headless iamb, iamb, anapest, iamb. Everything had a deeper meaning—the sun, the trees, the Friday rush hour traffic. It all pointed to something more. And I was going to find it.
I had tried Jesus. I really had: the Catholic Jesus, the Young Life Jesus, the Jesus of my evangelical college. A silent Jesus, a faraway Jesus, a Jesus of rules and limits and structure. A Jesus of sacrifice and atonement on behalf of a personal me caught with her hand in the cookie jar. A heavy Jesus I carried around, not with joy or for freedom but for the sake of being good. A Jesus of sacrificial expectations. A Jesus who exhausted me.
But on Thursday afternoons, I could breathe. The advanced poetry workshop was a different kind of place, this generic beige classroom with the fluorescent lights. Here my college classmates and I oohed and aahed over a dramatic line break, a powerful turn of phrase, a quietly stunning metaphor, a precisely coordinated spark of irony. We brought our own offerings—the immature, awkward, half-baked poems we’d read aloud. There were no prerequisites, no application fees, no letters of recommendation required. Our professor, Jack Ridl, pronounced us clean before the work even began, offering the radical grace of the automatic A.
