By Victoria Garton

This was before young writers studied and got MFA after their names and therefore knew they were poets. This was when colleges brought in the friends of English professors as visiting poets and made chump change on spring poetry workshops. This was when young mothers who penned lines mostly kept the habit to themselves because there was no internet, no blogs, no social media and if they showed their writing, that person patted them of the hand and said, “That’s nice darling.” Our story involves one such young poet who, despite trepidations, sent a manuscript of a half-dozen poems and twenty of her husband’s hard-earned dollars and found herself sitting before a stage used recently by the drama department, hence the trellises, dusty ferns, tissue-paper carnations. She didn’t know that the three men and one woman on stage couldn’t divide the loaves and fishes and still eat their fill, so she assumed they would before the afternoon ended give her the keys to the poetry kingdom or at least a glimpse of whether her words would ever be on the high wall where real poetry was chiseled.

She sat on a folding chair surrounded by other supplicants: a few students having bad hair days, one old woman in scuff house shoes, several teachers with pencils stuck in buns or behind ears, several old men with neckties pulled askew like they had recently retired. All looked up to the female poet whose flowing tresses gave off shade like a conifer and threatened to up-stage the men. She was rumored to be the third wife of a prominent writer which conferred status more than the tiny book of poems she had written. Her fingers shuffled through manuscripts, stopping praying mantis like to tap a word here and one there.

The young poet could hardly breathe wondering if her manuscript was under those fingers. 

She had no doubt before the afternoon ended hers would be chosen, dissected, and perhaps polished a bit, given the gleam of truth by the poet who looked rather like the pop-bellied bear her little son played with or perhaps by the one on the other end who had the self-containment of a monkey in a balloon no child would dare approach with a pin. The middle poet rose to speak of Emily and Dylan and their views on poetry as if they had offices next to his at some esteemed college. She could hardly listen for breathing the mantra, “Mine, mine. Let mine be chosen.

But it wasn’t her name that was called when the speeches finally ended, and the tree-like woman lifted a manuscript and sounded out a name. A man a row ahead shook off surprise, reached for his papers, stood, and recited what to the young poet sounded like splay-footed pig Latin.

“Very interesting,” said the bear as if he had just heard the dullest poetry ever written. 

“Reminds me of the early e. e. cummings,” said the monkey, who then paraphrased one of his recent lectures. 

“Take this down,” The praying mantis finger of the tree woman pointed so the versifier sunk and began scribbling, erasing, and scribbling. Thus, the afternoon passed and even the grandmother in house shoes wasn’t spared. Undaunted, the young poet listened for her name and took notes and wondered at times if the four on stage really knew how to tell beginners how to write poems or if they were just trying to impress each other with big words. Tree woman won with the use of “onomatopoeia” though this was before Google so few in the audience knew what it meant or could look it up. No one on stage gave a clue by saying “oink” or “chirp” or “ding-dong.” The young poet was familiar with sound words because she read bedtime stories to her children.

Finally, “I think we have time for one more,” came from the bear as he patted his belly and yawned. Time for hibernation. The young poet gulped, her dreams of raining down words that would cleanse the ferns and flood the trellises threatened. Was she doomed to slink home, stick her manuscript in a drawer, and return to mothering? 

No, she was not. Even though the demigods of poetry passed over her words, she went home and kept writing. She wrote until she knew that the workshop poets had not failed her, that there was no key to the poetry kingdom. Even if the poet with long tresses could have let down her hair and pulled the young poet up, she wouldn’t have because that only happened in fairy tales. The young poet became an old poet, still sending out her words, some of which were published in little journals and chapbooks and collections. Some of which, most of which, were passed over.

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Victoria Garton’s books are Venice Comes Clean (Flying Ketchup Press, 2023), Pout of Tangerine Tango (Finishing Line Press, 2022), and Kisses in the Raw Night (BkMk Press, 1989.) The anthology, From K.C., MO to East St. Lou, (Spartan Press, 2022) featured ten of her poems. Recent acceptances are from Cosmic Daffodil, Sangam, Proud to Be, Thorny Locust, Waywords Literary Journal, and I-70 Review.