Defining Moment #12

#12: “Nutting”

I have been a poet since I was six years old. My first poem went like this: “I sent a letter to my love/and he sent me a beautiful white dove/It set sail across the sea/My true love sent it just for me.”

That’s no great work of art. But I was six. I didn’t stop writing. I was the school poet, the one whose poems got passed around school. And when I grew up, I was still writing poetry, and it still wasn’t good. Until I learned the meaning of “Nutting,” a poem by William Wordsworth.

Dr. David Bergman’s poetry class—and the enthusiasm he exuded—forever changed how I read and what I read. (He even influenced how I teach.)

A few years later, years after I’d had some poems published in City Paper, I would meet women who’d say, “Are you the one who wrote this?” They’d tell me my poem had been on their refrigerators since the day they’d read it.

Girls weren’t passing my poems around anymore. Women were keeping them.