08.08.2002 - 11:38 a.m.

I went up to Fells Point last night, to support Jimmy at an open mic. It was the final exam for the poetry class he�s been taking over the last few weeks. I had a great time. I love the atmosphere of a poetry reading, even one that consists of eleven summer students who mumble a lot. It made me wish I�d brought poems to read, too, stagefright or no stagefright. It made me write poems in my head for the first time in a long while.

There was this one guy who�d brought his guitar, not a run-of-the-mill acoustic but a real classical guitar like the one my mom used to play. He�d written songs. At first he sounded like a cross between Rob Thomas from Matchbox 20 and that guy from the Calling only, well, not as good. But he could play. He didn�t just strum, but picked out the notes individually, precisely. Once he got over his nerves he even sang pretty good, not like some rock star but like himself. I could hear just enough of the words to know that they had to mean something; just the way they weaved in and out of the cascading melody meant something. Live music somehow always means more.

And at least once for each student, between the singsong recitals of �dark as nights� and �you are my everythings� that most beginning poets think they have to use, there was a phrase or a glimpse of an idea that made me think, �This person has important things to say.� Through the nerves and awkward phrases, I could see that all of them were glad to finally speak. It made me wonder how many of them would keep writing, would understand the power writing can have in examining life. And how many would simply think of it as homework from some class they never had to take again.

For most of them, it was the first time in their lives they�d ever shared any of their own words, anything that really belonged to them. Some admitted that this class had been the first time they�d ever created at all. It was a hard concept for me to grasp. How can you get through two decades of life and never write about any of it?

Somewhere in my parents� house, in a closet next to that classical guitar, is a book of old folk songs. It�s big. You wouldn�t believe there were that many songs floating around. My mom used to play some of them�Greensleeves and Barbara Allen and Scarborough Fair. Leftover bits of her hippy years. Sometimes she would try one of the other ones, the ones nobody knows anymore. They�re beautiful, you know. There�s this one I don�t remember about love and a cherry with no stone�long ago, almost everyone knew these songs. It wasn�t so unusual to find a group of people in a house or a bar singing too loud over a badly tuned guitar. Creation is joyful. Sometimes technical merit just isn�t the point.

I�m not going to get into one of those clich�d rants about the evils of technology and how it�s made us all soulless machines. It's just not true. But I do think that once there was radio and TV, when we stopped entertaining each other and started trusting the �real artists� to say everything that needed to be said, we lost something pretty important. The rest of us lost our voices.

Maybe it�s unfair of me to wish that everyone write and make music just because I love words and music. Everyone has creative outlets; people garden, build things, draw, knit and sculpt. People have jobs that require all sorts of creative thought. People dream and love and think important things about life.

I just wish I could hear what more people have to say about it, that�s all.

-stonebridge

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