It is a humbling experience to look through one’s old writings – you know, the ones that were so deeply praised when you 16, 18, 22? The one that now look like, well, like  they were written by a sixteen year old, eighteen year old, or twenty-two year old.

I used to attend a lot of open mic poetry events, back in the day – from roughly 1990-2002. The early ones took place at people’s homes and then coffeehouses started to come back – not Starbucks style places with lattes, but dingy little places with bad coffee whose main draw was a certain elán  and sense of commitment to a Beatnik style of life. Places like CAMS in Pinellas Park and Mother’s Milk in Clearwater.

These open mics were different from slams, about which I have mixed feelings. But I also have mixed feelings about my mixed feelings. Slams necessarily value performance and the delivery of widely accepted messages (opposition to discrimination, the societal problems caused by socio-economic inequality, love is cool, etc) over craft – rather the opposite of MFA poetry, which can by entirely too “crafty.”

I say have I mixed feelings about my mixed feelings because I also know that I am not an impartial judge, for two reasons. One is simply that, with a few exceptions, I don’t write poems that do well in slams. I have one or two, but they are rarities, so can’t discount the possibility that my anti-slam bias is itself biased by sour grapes.

The other issue is a little more tricky, because it has something to do with race (and a little to do with age). I am a white male, over 35 and I never really got into hip hop when I was younger. And slam poetry is closely intertwined with forms  of rap and hip hop – which is to say, with cultures emerging out of black and latino communities. How much of my mistrust of the quality of slam poetry is simply that of a privileged white male who closely associates himself with the classic forms of Western European culture and who cannot or will not properly understand a culture driven by those who are both younger and of a different ethnic environment.

But to return to my original point…

Once, I looked at my accumulated body of work and it seemed quite large. But, of course, the poems of one’s youth don’t hold up so well, do they? You look through all these puerile pages and wonder why you ever thought well of yourself?

When you reduce it just those that are actually “good,” you see that your true oeuvre is actually just a handful of pieces.

I shudder when I think what the local poets I used with read with must have thought of me. A silly boy writing sad, silly love poems. Humbling to imagine myself.

Leading of course, to wonder what will I think of what I write now in 15 years? Maybe well enough. There seems some evidence that once “peaks” as a poet in one’s late thirties and forties. I am nearing that point.