sw00007a-human.poet

Of My Personal Self and My Poet Self


Due in part to my upbringing, in part to my INFP
personality, in part to my small frail body, I have
had to struggle to be self-confident.  Were it not
for my intellectual strength and numeralogically-
verifiable willingness to take risks, and the human
and other angels who have impacted my life, I would
not be here.  Still, my lack of self-confidence has
many times hurt me and hurt others.  During the past
few years, years heavy with Internet learning, it
seems my INFP self is moving toward becoming an ENFP
self.  When I was in the early grades, I used to
climb to the topmost branches of a tall soft maple
on our corner double lot and shake those branches so
others would fear to come near me.  In that I was
foolishly bold.  When I was in graduate school at
The University of Iowa, I might well have gotten an
A grade in one class instead of the C grade I did
get, but the professor so successfully panned a poem
by Ben Jonson, not one of us there could muster the
self-confidence to stand against him.  He, as you
might have intuited, was testing us; and we all
failed.  Shortly before time expired, he told us why
that poem was actually a superb poem.  Knowing this
to be true all along, I sunk in my seat and damned
myself.
-
When I was 12, I thought I wanted to be an astro-
physicist, though I was also into imaginative map-
making and learning about flowers, birds, and wild
kingdoms in general.  I once tried to do an oil
painting.  I did write my first poem then, if you
are open to calling it that.  You can tell by its
title, "The God-Created Milky Way", that it likely
is a not-worth-much effort, but it is number one.
Although I, not one who throws things away easily,
have somehow lost twenty or so of my early efforts,
here, in chronological order, are the titles (along
with annotations) of the two I feel were the most
important:
"Woodland Shades" (which was published in a 
                   national high school anthology,
                   and then in an issue of the
                   Marquette Journal)
"A Freedom Song for Southern Africa" (1960)
-
Sixteen personally significant later poems are:
"To John Keats"
"To Shakespeare"
"Symphony"
"Fond du Lac"
"Snow"
"The Mind Has Seasons Out of Time"
"Doom"
"Words for Walt"
"Birthday Ribbons"
"Apology of a Hypocrite"
"At First to Poets"
"Saying Good-bye"
"Pride"
"A Look In"
"After the Apple"
"The Forty-One Days of Kim"
-
Since 1973 I have been (unlike the majority of poets)
reclusive, though not as Emily Dickinson or Lorine
Niedecker were.  My most ambitious work, written
mostly in 1976, was originally 366 sonnets intended
to be a kind of celebration of that bicentennial
year.  I entitled it 1976.  That book, and
Fond du Lac, Postures, and a slightly
revised Rooted Sky--which had been published
late in 1972--I published in the cassette medium in
1980 under my nascent Thinking Lizard imprint.  I
ascribed authorship to one family-history relevant
Alden St. Cloud, a pen name I concocted.  I then
registered these publications with the Library of
Congress, especially since I had acquired ISBNs for
Thinking Lizard.  Early in 1982, during a short stay
in Austin, Texas, I published an actual Alden St.
Cloud Thinking Lizard printed book containing some
new poems, but mostly selected poems or parts of
poems going back into my high school years.  I don't
recall how many copies I had made, but I think it 
was 25 or less.  I entitled it First Pick.  I
then registered that book with the Library of Con-
ress.  In June of 1982, I and my wife companion
moved to UF town.  About a year or so later--again I
do not exactly recall--I wrote "Alden St. Cloud's
Prayer to the Rune", afterwhich I let Alden die.
None of the books by that alter ego are currently
available.  Even the copy I have of the printed book
is not a proper copy, though it is complete.  I am
being enticed by the WWW/Internet to place most of
my writings online, but just the physical act of doing
that would take me years, years I may not have.
 -
 Autobiographical update:  Some of the poems in
                                         the above list will be
 included in a newly-born book entitled Venturings.



Brian A. J. Salchert