colleenkeefe

1989-1990 – University City, Missouri

(At this time I lived in a two bedroom apartment on Delmar with Ace and Andrea.)

During my senior year at Washington University, I was considering applying for an MFA program either in poetry or in sculpture. My poetry teacher, Don Finkel, invited me out for drinks at Blueberry Hill on Delmar. We sat at a small table and drank beer, and he told me that he had been interested in sculpture and poetry in undergrad, and that he felt that he had had to choose. “It's great that you're doing both,” he said, and hoped that I wouldn't have to stop doing one. I was pretty committed to both practices, though I wasn't sure how they tied together (30-plus years later, I still don't).

I thought it was a lovely gesture and it's been a vivid memory since. An adult took an interest in my creative direction. My creative writing pursuits were outside the scope of my major, but I never declared a minor in writing, so he was under no obligation to provide guidance. He just did it because he saw something in me, and to this day I hold the gift of his time and attention close.

I continued to write poems for a few years after college – the year I lived in South St. Louis, and the following year that I spent with my father in Boston. But when I moved to Bloomfield Hills to obtain my MFA in Sculpture at Cranbrook, I largely set poetry aside.

It was always there, though, humming in my subconscious. There are poems I wrote 30 years ago that I can still recite from memory. There's a way the cadence and music of a poem stamps itself in your brain, a literary/musical earworm that you write for yourself and – mostly – lives on only because you feed it.

So when I returned to writing a few years ago, it felt like I was unknotting something in me that needed unknotting.

I thought of Don. I still do, from time to time. Don at the small table where we workshopped poems, getting unreasonably excited about a poem written by a 20 year old – a poem that was lovely and clunky and awkward and endearing and fragile and full of promise, like the poet themself.

Late in life, before Alzheimer's took him, he returned to sculpture, and I think about that decades-long span of time where sculptures made of buttons and bricolage (he called them “dreckolage”) rattled around inside him, waiting to be born, and how we carry inside our bodies only the needful things.

Mine were words.