by Mary Padilla
After poetry class
I drive home in a blizzard.
The van in front of me
says Experienced Brain Technicians.
I am thinking of Frank O’Hara
in whose world I just spent 90 minutes.
Maybe that is what poets are,
experienced…brain…
Five miles pass
some snow falls off
the B becomes a D
and I am following plumbers.
Still
there does seem to be technique
to poetry
and
it seems to come from experience
real or imagined.
I am a poet, he keeps saying
very much a poet.
Does he doubt himself so much?
Very much, I am a poet.
I am poet, very much.
A poet I am.
Am I?
Mary Padilla set out last semester to investigate poetry by signing up for two study groups on the subject. When that wasn’t sufficiently clarifying the nature of the medium for her, being at TNS, the home of John Dewey, she tried learning-by-doing and attempted to write some of her own.