Old Journals

We have this closet, and in the closet are boxes. The boxes are filled with crap we've been hoarding, from early in our marriage, from college. From high school.

Inside the boxes, there are wedding cards, mementos from our honeymoon. Lots of spewed forth words on paper with grades on them, Doug's spew has many a higher grade than my spew, and he retained a lot more of his academic work than I did.

But in the midst of C+ papers for literary criticism class and James Joyce senior seminar class, I found two old journals of mine. From 1985 and 1986. Before I met Doug. When I dated Steve. There are poems in there. Some of them are great. Some are absolute shite.

I plan on sifting. Finding the ones that are halfway sort of decent. I'll post some of them here and you can laugh at me.

When I met Doug in 1986, he was an English major. He changed majors and scoffed at us English types as "starry eyed poets sitting on our asses" or something along those lines.

I've not written a good poem in many years. So my starry-eyed poetess career may be considered as over and done with.

Another gem of surprise that I found were several editions of an underground little publication called "Ralph" which a friend of ours published. We had a literary magazine at my school, I was the editor one year. And Ted published Ralph, Bert, Yak, and other very interesting poetry collections on mimeographed paper printed off the VAX system at our school.

There are quite a few poems by Clayton in there.

Some of them are just priceless.

I never submitted anything to Ralph because I felt that I wasn't cool and pretentious English majory enough. I wish I had. I had some good stuff that could stand right up next to some of the drivel in there. I should contact Ted and see if he's transcribed these to the web yet.

Anyway -- I have to run. I'm supposed to sub at Geoff's school but don't have to be there until 9:30. I dropped him off, ran some errands, came back here to call Doug and let him know not to pick up Geoff. So I'm off. More later perhaps.

We'll see me then soon -- some glimpses. But until then, here's me now: