I don’t even know what the official phrase for a collection of poets, a gathering of poets, a pride (?) of poets is, but I wish it was represented by the word “gaggle” because I feel it’s funny and poignant. The word “gaggle” is reserved for a group of geese, who cluck and whistle at each other in order to communicate, and that’s how I feel when poets get together. About seventeen years ago I was heavily involved in a gaggle of poets in my native Philadelphia. We ate, we lived, we BREATHED poetry day in and day out. It sustained us, it united us, but it also enhanced the difference between us and the regular denizens of the city we called home. Because, if there was one thing we weren’t, it was demure. We were loud. We were raucous. We did what we wanted, when we wanted, and we didn’t care how people labeled us. And when we got together, watch out because it was going to be an explosive situation.
Poets are expressive and emotional. It is a nature of the calling, and a consequence of the creativity it takes to maintain the zeitgeist known as poetry. And I’m talking about real poets here, not the random guy who scribbles down a note on a napkin and calls it a poem. I’m talking about the people whose lives revolve around their poetry, the refined… oh, who am I kidding? I’m talking about anyone who identifies with the written word through verse form. And those people vary widely, from the Russian immigrant who writes about communism, to the California girl who writes haiku, to the homeless man whose poems only exist in his head because he has nowhere to write them down.
It was incredible. It was intense. It was almost psychotropic being with a group of individuals so similar to me when it came to that one part of my soul, and yet so different when it came to pretty much anything else. We stayed over each others’ houses, we performed improv in the streets, and we had a non-stop party and writing fest the likes of which I felt had never been known. But like everything so dynamic, it was too intense to sustain itself, and we all went our separate ways. Fast forward to this year, two months ago to be exact, and I found myself in a similar place after all those years, with a similar group of people. All poets.
They say lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice, but then again, they would be wrong, whoever “they” are. I sense the same storm brewing here and now, with this particular gaggle of poets, even though the participants (besides me) are different, the place is different, the feelings different, and yet the intensity, the focus, the creativity are the same. You see, it’s because we really are a gaggle, with no time, place, or even similar participants to stop us. We’re loud, we’re gregarious, and when we get together there is a magic there.
Not unlike a group of geese getting ready to soar.
Sam
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