Writers write a lot about writing-which, incidentally, I’ve been told should only be done by published writers who can back up what they are saying with works that are circulating in the world and cash in the bank. But not everyone who writes gets published; and not everyone who gets published is an inspired creative writer. Those two things sometimes go together, but not always.

I write because it is something I do. I sang to myself as a pre-literate child; I grew up in a world of books and story-tellers; I had crayons, pencils, paint and paper available to me from earliest memory. I told stories to my mother, grandmother and aunt at every opportunity (which weren’t that many-they were busy women keeping our little household afloat financially), and my dolls, toys, rocks, sticks and whatever might have been at hand enacted imaginative events.

As soon as I could spell I started writing letters to my aunt (who joined the Army when I was three), and as soon as I understood rhyming, wrote page after page of 4 line stanzas. I won’t call them poetry; I’m not sure I would even grace them with the term doggerel. They were largely imitations of songs and jump-rope rhymes that I had memorized.

I started keeping a journal when I was ten; a habit I have continued. I wrote my first complete novelette in high school (mercifully lost in the sands of time), my first play-not so lost, but having only sentimental value-as well as scads of short-stories of the usual teen angst, and have killed any number of trees writing poems.

Over the years, I’ve sold a couple of paintings, had a few tidbits published here and there (but not often), and at the age of 48, I wrote my second novel, and by 50 my third. (They languish is a drawer, as I work on the one I hope will actually be worthy of sending “out there”.) Then I went to graduate school, and everything except the poetry and the journal went on hold as I juggled adult children newly out of the nest, a more than full-time job, and 9 to 12 hours per semester of graduate studies.

When I graduated with my shiny new master’s and ventured into the education world, life didn’t really get any less busy till about a year ago. I’m still working, but my children are truly independent. I’m still learning about teaching (I always will be), but it is easier and I have a nice backlog of lesson plans to draw on. I returned to writing a bit-a chapter or two here and there, longer poems. No short stories-somehow that medium wasn’t speaking to me.

Then I discovered Triond. Money for writing? WONDERFUL!!! I wrote and wrote and wrote whatever came to mind and threw it boldly out into the world. After a time, I noticed that my little how-to, self-help articles and recipes were the items netting income, but I still posted the occasional poem.

One particularly trying day I offended/irritated a friend and wrote a short little piece dealing with my guilt and frustration and posted it to Triond. Someone commented at the end of it, “You are a bad, bad poet, that’s who you are.”

I’ve been called a lot of things, and it hasn’t put me off the habit of writing poetry yet. In fact, I’ve even been known to read some of it out loud in mixed company (writers and non-writers, that is), so I sure wasn’t going to let a one-liner by an unknown person stop me from writing. I was curious-had this person written anything? He or she had a Triond account. I checked-under that name, no writing. Well, then! Maybe later there will be some, I thought charitably.

But I couldn’t leave it alone. A bad, bad poet. A poet who is a bad person? A person who writes bad poetry? Well, I have been guilty of the latter, and I’m sure no saint, so maybe the former as well. Was that particular poem that bad? It had been written in the heat of the moment; it did make a couple of very trite literary references; and it was a shape poem-something usually reserved for elementary children or for very accomplished poets. Maybe the shape wasn’t right for the message. Maybe the reader didn’t like the message, or maybe s/he didn’t like poetry at all in the first place. Maybe the reader thought all poetry should rhyme-this poem did not. Was my scansion somewhere seriously misplaced? What had caused this person to comment that I was a bad, bad poet?

Then I realized something. Regardless of this commentator’s intent, that one short sentence had done something that endless compliments or judicious comments had not: I was actually thinking about what I was writing, rather than just throwing words on paper. Hand to me a piece of paper and a pencil; words and pictures will dribble out of the pencil all over that page-especially if I am trapped in a meeting of librarians or teachers. Just filling a page, however, does not make its contents deathless prose or great art.

So, get out the red pencils, run the spell checker, grab family members, co-workers, or students and coerce them into being first readers. It’s a big world out there, someone somewhere is going to like what I write.

Will there be more poems from the “bad, bad poet”? Assuredly. Writing a bad poem or six beats the dickens out of storming into the front office and throwing a fit, screaming at school children, saying mean things to ones co-habitants or any number of other anti-social actions that go with being in a bad mood. Some of them might even earn a penny or two…or someone else might feel the same way and find my verse a small outlet for their frustration.