Seventeen days into the year 2008, my second chakra, I taught My Life is Poetry: An autobiographical poetry workshop for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender seniors. The chakra’s focus on creativity and sexuality. I saw the work I was doing as promoting creativity. Weekly I’d meet with over 20 seniors and teach poetry as memoir. My students would tell me how much the class was changing their lives, how they saw themselves and viewed the world around them. They connected with the pleasure of poetry writing and the joy of finding/using their voice and expressing the emotions and experiences of their life. We met weekly for 16 weeks, created a book, and then met monthly.
This would have been satisfying enough for me. I was helping connect a valuable population with art and their creative drives. It was at The One Institute that I saw a used copy of Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency for sale. I read an O’Hara poetry book years ago and wasn’t overly struck. This copy was inexpensive and I liked “meditation” being in the title. Poems can be a meditation, not just a story or experience. Reading the book in bed the next morning, I was awed by his voice, craft, the controlled looseness, his humor, the queerness of his voice. This wasn’t the work I remembered. My feelings for the work were so strong I questioned if I ever read him before or what changed within me to appreciate the work. One poem, one of his lesser known, I read and felt deeply. I kept rereading it, reading it aloud; I wanted to inhabit this poem, live in the lines. I felt the poem but didn’t understand it. The poem “For Grace After a Party” haunted me. I copied it into my journal and read it daily for a couple of weeks. I found a new way to write and an idol.
While I encouraged others in my class, I thought of Frank’s work as an encouragement for myself. I started writing in a different way. It was sparser, a bit playful, nonlinear, and a bit loose. For the second year of S(t)even Years, I had one of my biggest creative awakenings in over a decade.
The chapbook for this year, As If Memories Were Not Enough, consists of five poems in the new style. The cover image is a recreation and honoring of a famous Frank O’Hara photograph.