My Journey to Poets House
I am convinced we are all on a journey and the lucky ones among us are willing to record and remember our stories from these journeys. My journey is defined in part by my journey to Poets House. It began on a Friday morning last September when I opened The New York Times.
I was holding the morning edition during a post-run breakfast when I stumbled upon the first write-up about the library in its new location in Battery Park City. I devoured the article, musing all the while about how phenomenal it would be not only to spend time at such a place in the greatest city in the world, but also to be able to work there.
Despite clipping and saving that particular article, I put the library out of my immediate thoughts for a few weeks, accepting the truth of my situation at the time. Being at school in Allentown, Pennsylvania and competing in cross-country meets every other weekend were not conducive to spending time getting lost among shelves of poetic works and cases of chapbooks—not to mention the difficult commute which would have been easier had I been living at home.
It would be a few weeks later when I regained footing on my journey to Poets House. I was inspired to investigate the poem “Invictus” largely as a result of the then impending release of the movie of the same name. While falling in love with Henley’s words, I stumbled upon Poets House’s website where I gleefully realized I could intern there. Shortly after, I started pulling things together; revising and updating my resume, drafting a cover letter, and getting in touch with Mike Romanos, the intern coordinator, to set up an interview for a position, all before I left for five months of study abroad in Scotland.
I took the train from my hometown into midtown the first Saturday of my winter break to interview. I remember trudging through the wind-whipping snow along River Terrace, fearing I was going to be late. In the end, perhaps needless to say, all went tremendously well; Mike offered me a position for the summer and I was squared away with an exciting prospect that would make my ultimately sad and difficult leave of Scotland that much more endurable in June.
This journey to Poets House is now a story I enjoy sharing. The sheer serendipity of my reading an article about a poetry library and then landing an internship there is almost too good to believe. And yet it encourages me to reflect on what really was at work to make it jive so smoothly. My gut feeling is that luck was (thankfully) not a major factor. I would pin down the success of this journey to my passion for poetry, my wanting to learn about the world around me, my growing capacity to plan ahead and act on prospects that matter to me and my interaction with today’s technology.
So, in the end, at risk of sounding like a broken record, I say that our journeys truly are about getting places and those critical steps in between, poetic in nature or not. But perhaps the true expression of such journeys is the final key component. Because, really, who can feel, experience, wander, trek, travel, endure, without feeling subsequently and undeniably compelled to ignite that same flame of adventure and intrigue in others?
-Kate Mahoney
