Warm pre-spring nights like this one always make me feel...better? I don't know if better is the word. Nostalgic perhaps. Because they make me think of a similar such night in the pre-Spring of 1991 when I first encountered Kenneth Rexroth's 100 Poems from the Chinese.

I remember I had just gone from Marlboro College's dining hall to my work-study job in the library. There were only the earliest traces of leaf-buds on the trees that were everywhere around campus. I was most likely full and full of coffee, the great thing about the Marlboro College dining hall was that you could eat as much as you wanted from a fairly large variety of food. Having grown up more or less "white trash," it was the first time I had experienced many of the foods that the dining hall served: felafel, pesto, hoummus, you name it. I was a vegetarian then. I remember cutting up my mouth trying to eat an artichoke because I didn't know you were supposed to just scrape the meat from the sharp leaves.

Anyway, I was in the room in the basement of the library where all of the books came in to be processed for putting them on the shelves. It was my job to use one of those spongy fake-tonuge things to apply the little Marlboro College Library sticker to the inside of the front cover. I would then type (type!) the call number on a little slip of paper and apply the adhesive plastic window around it to attach it to the spine and then I would type the bibliographic information into a primitive DOS program. At the end of the night I would print out all of the card catalog cards on a dot-matrix printer and then go file them in the card catalog. The head librarian's name was Sally Andrews. I think she might be dead now.

The Rexroth book was in the stack books to be checked in. It was the harcover edition with the special vellum flyleaf and the vellum pages in front of the first page of each section where the poet's name was written in Chinese. I guess I was enticed by the beauty of the book itself, and started to read the poems. I had never seen anything like those poems before. I don't think I had had any contemporary poetry classes, or poetry classes at all for that matter, as it was only my second semester of college. I was in a workshop, though, and writing horrible poems as much influenced by The Cure and Joy Division as they were by what I had read to that point: T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, E.E. Cummings, Richard Brautigan and a few others. There was something to the elegance of the plain language that Rexroth used that clicked in my head and I felt like my entire perception of what poetry was and could be was changing in the space of the time that I read the book cover to cover when I was supposed to be processing the stack of books. I have since realized that I probably could have stolen the book then, and nobody would have ever realized since it hadn't been processed or entered into the stacks yet. But I was a better person then, and such a thing would not have even occured to me.

As I was reading that stuff, though, I realized that I was going to be a poet. It was pretty much in the cards at that point anyway; I had been lauded for poems I had written in high school and had been the editor for my High School literary magazine, but it was unclear whether I was going to be a writer of fiction or poems, or a photographer, or an artist, or a drunk... But at that moment, I knew that it was poetry. Had I known what being a poet would really mean, in terms of my life, my relationship with my family and the sacrifices I would need to make, I may have slit my wrists then and there. But of course I didn't realize. I didn't really realize that there was anything different about being a poet than there was about being an accountant, or a scientist, or anything else...

I was still a virgin then.

I remember copying by hand Tu Fu's "Moon, Flowers, Man" and hanging it on the door to my dorm room. That dorm room that smelled of cigarettes, coffee, and "Black Velvet," the cheap Canadian Whiskey I was drinking at the time. God only knows who was buyingt that shit for me, but both my roommate, the crazy Pakistani speed metal guitarist, and I had developed a liking for it. And for the poems from that book, which I would take out of the library once it had been processed, by me. I got back late that night because I finished up the pile of books that I was supposed to, having lost a couple hours going through the Rexroth text. The library was mostly empty when I went upstairs to file the cards in their proper places in the card catalog.

I most likely went back to my room and did my homework, wrote a poem and probably drank Black Velvet, which seemed to always be on hand. I would impress the somewhat unsavory crowd I ran with at that time by drinking an entire bottle of the foul stuff and still being able to recite the poems I had memorized from that book. Everyone always seemed to be gone several hours after when I would eventually start to puke. Except for my roommate who also spent a fair amount of time throwing up that semester. That small fact aside, it was a pretty idyllic time, reading those poems, and other stuff that I had first encountered at that time, Nietzche, Jean Rhys, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, etc. etc.

It wasn't long before I was writing my own imitations of those poems, something that would not last long, but it marked a big step from those tawdry, turgid things I was writing prior to that. Admittedly it would take me a long time that things did not have to be crafted as aribtrarily and as pristinely as the stuff I was writing as a result of having come across that text, but it did mark an important stage in my development as a poet.

Later that semester I ordered my own paperback copy of the book. It is the copy that I still have today. Now dogeared and stained, a kind of avatar of the self, ala Portrait of Dorian Grey. Except that both the book and the man are aging. I'm not sure which is in better shape...