When a new poetry class starts at KSU

Now, I remember why it is each Fall I look around for some campus on which to study. Today, in the advanced poetry course, we read our first works to each other. No one was sick enough to run from the room, but it does take courage to read your first versions of new poems to a group of people you hardly know.

They were gloriously brave, colorful, honest, and true. There was music in the lines as they came from our mouths, quietly, then confidently. And the beauty of one poem hung in the air to bathe the next in some luminescent cloud so that the conference room was transformed.

The teacher, wise mid-wife of poems, dispensed with comments until they could all come forth--born into the world. Squealing for attention! Raw and red and angry, in some cases. In others, strangely still.

Now, this is an education...writing and reading, thinking, creating, revising, and speaking from our bony parts, where our flesh is connected, our of our bowels--our howls, our cries, our ecstasy.