Continuing the Craft: My Journey through Poetry
Even before I started school, my mother would take me to the library around the corner from my house, where we would sit for hours amidst the card catalogs in the old reading room reciting the poetry of Emily Dickinson out loud. My early understanding of the world around me was shaped by her language and painted in her metaphors. Sunrise became ribbons; snakes became narrow fellows. Though I tried my hand at sonnets, memorized Frost poems, and scribbled rhymes throughout my life (in handwriting I was often reprimanded for), at first I was more excited by the sparkle of a new notebook than the writing itself.
In high school, however, I was fortunate to have an incredible group of English teachers, from fiction writer Christine Schutt to life mentor Julie Whitaker who transformed books from The Odyssey to Crime and Punishment into beautiful worlds and sympathetic slices of life. I would stay up late and procrastinate studying for Physics tests to write poetry, sharing every scrap I wrote with Ms. Whitaker. By the end of senior year I had submitted a personal essay to Red, an anthology edited by Amy Goldwasser and had just completed a novel in poems called Mum’s the Word inspired by my discovery of contemporary poets like Jorie Graham and Anne Carson. My high school allowed me easy access to the Unterberg poetry center at the 92nd Street Y and a weekend at the Bread Loaf Young Writers Conference.
After I graduated, I was able to pursue poetry in a slightly more intimidating setting—traveling on a whim to St. Petersburg after a Russian lit elective and independent project on Chekhov. After this writing honeymoon, my first months at college brought me back to earth. I was suddenly uncertain of my writing and startled as I found my bearings in a new avant-garde circle of writers at Brown University. Rejected by literary journals after serving as editor for Philomel, my high school’s magazine, was humbling but helpful. Though I struggled, I finally understood that poetry was not a hobby or a talent or a choice…it was my life, at least my perspective on life.
Eventually, I settled in at Brown with writer friends and literature courses, but I missed the New York poetry scene, so I spent some time seeking advice from my favorite teachers from Anne Carson to Mark Doty. Finally, last summer, I found Lee Briccetti, the Executive Director of Poets House, an organization I had never heard of, and a poet I had not known. She was teaching Advanced Poetry at an NYU summer session I had rashly enrolled in after my summer job in Brooklyn fell through. When I found an article about Poets House in which Lee quoted Emily Dickinson, I knew I had happened upon a wonderful match!
Passionate and practical, encouraging and determined, Lee reminded me of my origins in poetry while helping me transition my mentality from a wandering outsider with an aesthetic that did not quite fit in to a poet and part of the world of poetry at large. Lee even imparted some of her wisdom as I tried to found a literary community and publication at Brown, which became The Round Magazine, a magazine for writers at Brown and outside Brown across genre and style. Lee inspired in me the desire not only to nourish my own work, but also to provide a space for students at Brown akin to the home Poets House provides for so many poets and readers in New York.
-Elizabeth Metzger
