Live Encounters Poetry & Writing July 2025
About the Building of “Bildungsgedicht”,
guest editorial by Carolyne Wright.
Poets often get asked what influenced them to start writing, and what made them fall in love with poetry—of all things—since (as the unvoiced subtext to this question often goes) of all literary genres it is the most poorly remunerated. This poem evolved as my response to that question. It’s called “Bildungsgedicht,” which is a play on Bildungsroman (formation novel), the German term for a novel about the artist’s early education and development. Examples are Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, and most of the books by Hermann Hesse. These are autobiographical novels about a gifted, but lonely and melancholy, misunderstood young man—in these novels it’s always a young man—who gradually finds himself, and becomes a brilliant and renowned writer through a series of transformative adventures and encounters in late adolescence and early manhood.
These life-changing encounters usually begin with a less talented but trusty and valiant pal or side-kick of his own age, who serves as foil and sounding board, until our hero moves on to his first romantic involvement, often with an unselfish older woman who serves as an early “muse” or (Jung’s term) “anima,” and who often—so unselfish of her!—initiates him sexually. After he learns what he needs from her, he moves on again (some would say he dumps her) to a connection with an older man who serves as teacher, mentor, spiritual guide, and—frequently—the first important contact in the wider world of publishing. This final encounter and interaction—with a powerful man—is really the key one, for which the others serve as mere preludes, since it launches our hero into the realm of his true identity and life’s work.
Until my graduate school days I didn’t much question the fact that all of the Bildungsromanen I was aware of were written by men, with male protagonists. But once I began to think about my own formation as a writer and poet, I grew skeptical of this male-centered literary paradigm. What about the writer who is female, I asked, and who writes poetry, of all poverty-inducing literary genres? How could I tell her story. . . my own story? It would have to be in poem form. So in good Germanic style, I invented (I thought) a compound word for “formation poem”: Bildungsgedicht. Several years later, glancing through a German-English dictionary, I discovered that the word already existed! Well, the wheel was no doubt invented independently by several different Neolithic geniuses on different continents during the same Ice Age.
In any case, Bildungsgedicht recounts how I first fell in love with poetry by falling into an infatuation, during the summer I turned sixteen, with a self-proclaimed poet—”Johnny Dee,” as he called himself—a Bob Dylan wannabe from the Boeing-industrial suburb of Renton who spent a lot of time “making the scene” at the Seattle Center. That was the same summer that Dylan “went electric” at the Newport festival, scandalizing the folk music elite, so Dylan was on every hip young person’s mind. I remember sitting in the downtown Seattle office of an acting studio where I was registering for a summer class, and hearing for the first time Dylan’s new song, “Like a Rolling Stone,” playing on a radio in one of the studio rooms. It was electrified—and electrifying.
I wondered, with all of Dylan’s sneering contempt for the woman he addresses in the lyrics, if I would be able to avoid becoming the subject of such competitive disdain if I got anywhere close to fame, or to famous people, or even to wannabe famous people. I had been through the Beatles craze phase, hearing them perform at the Seattle Coliseum the previous year–but I was not one of the screamers! I was fascinated by their work and their world, but also already skeptical. I could see, in the fast-paced, glamorous, and thoroughly macho culture of rock music, that there was no place for creative, independent women. The only role for cute young girls my age was as “chicks”—groupies, pieces of arm candy, and worse. Even at sixteen, I knew that I wanted to create art–whether in the theatre, graphic arts, or literature, I wasn’t yet clear–but I was certain that I did not want to be a chick: the fluffy poultry, and paltry, subordinate of some macho male artist.
Such as the Dylan rock star-wannabe Johnny Dee, who simply showed up one day in the Piccoli Theatre at the Seattle Center, where my summer acting class was rehearsing its final project, a full-length production of Kind Lady. He presented an immediate problem of emotional conflict—he had that bad-boy air so attractive to girls my age, the (no doubt carefully cultivated) Byronic-Dylanesque hero mystique of artistic talent, righteous indignation at social injustice, flirtations with the drug subculture and hard living, and the long-haired, slim good looks of the male ingenue Romeo. And he played in a band! I didn’t want to be any boy’s subordinate, competing with himself for his attention, but I was intrigued. I wanted to be with him, so that I could figure out how to be him—how to be what I thought he was: an independent-minded creative artist. (Interestingly, the Piccoli Theatre stood where the Jimi Hendrix “Experience Music Project” complex now stands, a monument to a true rock star and brilliant blues musician.)
Johnny Dee actually wrote what I later realized was appalling drivel, when I came upon a few pages of his lyrics in one of my file boxes years later. But the mannerisms and pretensions of this Beatle-suited youth stirred my imagination, and I wrote a few bad Bob Dylan imitation lyrics in his honor. Once the Piccoli Theatre production of Kind Lady ended, I landed a small role in another community theatre’s production of The Tempest, so I was hearing, and reciting, some of the finest poetry in the English language in rehearsals every evening. The eminently speakable quality of Shakespeare’s poetry for the theatre impressed me, even more than reading it on the page. I was entranced with the way that poetry is truly an oral / aural medium, a performance medium. After Johnny Dee unceremoniously dumped me later that summer, as the poem recounts, I turned to more dependable literary sources for solace: to Shakespeare, the Romantics and Modernists, and to contemporary American poetry as I could discover it then. That’s when I first started to write poetry in a serious manner. I haven’t yet written poetry for the stage—plays and other performance pieces—but I do try to perform my poems when I give readings, incorporating Slam Poetry energy and performative qualities with complex and nuanced literary language.
The poem “Bildungsgedicht” started in the mid-1980s, when I was back in Seattle during the summer, between teaching and fellowship “gigs,” staying at my parents’ house. I was reading the latest Marilyn Hacker book: Assumptions, I think it was. With the brilliant melding of formal and narrative elements in her poetry, and a fast-paced, colloquial, and culturally allusive mixed diction, Hacker has been called the Lord Byron of our age. I found myself playing around with lines in a similar tone, and an early version of “Bildungsgedicht” emerged. But the poem felt awkward—I didn’t yet have the “chops” for poetic wit in form, and I was engrossed in writing two different series of poems in altogether different voices—so I put this poem away for years. In the winter of 2000-2001, leafing through a file of old drafts, I came upon that version, typed on my long-retired Smith Corona electronic word processor. Rereading it, I had one of those ah-ha moments: Hey, this is pretty good, I should work on it. It didn’t take long at that point to revise the poem to its current form. I began sending it to magazines and contests—it subsequently received an Honorable Mention in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards competition sponsored by the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College.
This poem became a “hit” of sorts at readings, and I have liked to conclude with it, because it ends the performance “where all poems start” (to paraphrase Yeats)—the beginning at the end—with the nascent poet writing her first poem. To read the poem aloud is like a brief return to the acting career that I put aside in favor of teaching (another profession calling for histrionic skills) and of writing / performing my own poetry. It has the comic parts I was too serious and too shy to play back in my teens. Now that I have lived long enough to take a humorous perspective on my own life, I can recreate with my grown-up voice the sixteen-year-old personae of Johnny Dee, his sidekick Don, and the poet-performer herself. I’ve discovered that listeners in their teens and early twenties enthusiastically identify with the adolescent younger self who speaks in the poem, and are gratified to hear this revelation of my own beginnings. They can glimpse, in the “successful, accomplished” poet’s early days, all the flaws and disappointments to which they themselves are susceptible. Grown-up listeners, especially fellow baby-boomer children of the Sixties, recall their own younger selves in the voices of adolescent aspiration, and pretension, in the poem. They recognize how the mature speaker both honors and pokes fun at her younger self in the process of retrospection: with affectionate exasperation at her youthful foolishness, and with nostalgia for the days when all her potential was wide open—not yet tested, not yet realized, and also not yet humbled by the awareness of its inevitable human limitation.
One presentation of this poem was a particular hit. I was more than halfway through an early evening reading at a Borders bookstore, among the literature and poetry shelves. Unbeknownst to my listeners, in the café across the store, I could see that a local rock ‘n’ roll group was setting up for a gig—clearly an overlapping performance that the store’s event organizers had not informed us about. I hastened to bring my reading to a close, and began reciting “Bildungsgedicht” just as the guitar and bass began tuning up and trading preliminary riffs. Talk about synchronicity! My listeners wondered for the first minute or so if I had not secretly arranged for this accompaniment, but then the group launched into their first number, and I had to declaim the last few stanzas at the top of my lungs as the cacophony of drums and guitars blasted through the building and ricocheted off the walls.
Another memorable reading of this poem was at the scene of the crime, as it were— at the Seattle Center for Bumbershoot. This was a Labor Day weekend, on the Starbucks Stage—only a few hundred yards from where Johnny Dee had eased into the Piccoli Theatre to check out the rehearsal, and where he and the chick who had been me had made the scene at the Food Circus, the fountain, and the boot-scuffed, cigarette butt-littered grassy knoll near the carnival rides with the infamous informal name, Hippy Hill. As I read the poem to the ideal audience, one who recognized every landmark and caught every allusion, I half-expected to see John Dee Roy (his real name) lurking at the edge of the crowd. Not as the mop-topped, Beatle-booted youth, but more likely—as I imagined him in late middle age—a balding, paunchy, laid-off fork-lift operator in cargo shorts and wife-beater tee shirt, with tattoos snaking up and down his arms and gaps in graying teeth, scowling in recognition of his younger self in the poem. If I had glimpsed him there, I might have waved and beckoned him to join me on the stage, to take a bow and share the applause.
Bildungsgedicht
At sixteen, I roamed Seattle Center with Johnny
Dee, the wicked-thin, mop-topped rock singer
who’d bopped into the Piccoli Theatre
while we rehearsed Kind Lady, and straightaway
asked me out. “Like, I dig your style,”
he drawled, lounging in a cracked plastic
chair under the Food Circus awning. Slipping
off his mirror shades, he talked of gigs
and record deals, his band “the hottest, you dig?,
in the whole South End.” So, would I be his chick?
Hours later, he put me on the city bus
to View Ridge. “Ta, luv,” he grinned. So cool.
So British. I waved to him through tinted windows
till he vanished in a swirling plume of diesel.
“Where have you been?” my mother fumed,
stabbing a toothpick into her midnight slice
of avocado. “Oh mother!” I rolled my eyes.
“Chill out! It was a long rehearsal.” My senses
tuned to night, I waited for the phone to ring.
“Mom, do you like my hair like this?”
I poked at it in the mirror. “Hey Mom?
You think I can sing?” A week slid by. He showed
up at dress rehearsal, in a blue tailored
Beatles suit, with his sidekick Don, who played drum
and bass. “I dig your threads,”
he chuckled, tightening his arm around my gauzy
black frock, on the park bench by the fountain. Don
slouched, smoking, at the other end. “So foxy.”
He kissed me, and took a cigarette from Don.
“Hey, you’re gonna dig this song
I wrote for you.” His tenor was smoky and nasal
like Dylan’s in A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.
“Well?” he looked me up and down. “Symbolical,”
I breathed, not yet knowing the word cliché
or bright moments of love’s throwaways.
All summer Johnny was prince of the penny arcade,
arms around me on the tilt-a-whirl,
mug-shot grins in the quarter photo booth,
twanging his guitar for street kids on the hill
who scored baggies of hashish and Panama Red
until security cameras zeroed in.
Johnny’s stoned effusions never let on
the double-mortgaged double-wide in Renton,
his father on the graveyard shift at Boeing,
his mother scolding my mother on the phone—
his needle tracks my fault, his Dexedrine
knocked back with coke, his hook-ups with “hookers, maybe
faggots.” The day he brought blonde Suzee
to the Food Court, I sobbed by the Orange Julius machine.
“Stop it,” he snapped. “Your mascara’s smeared.”
I rode north alone to the next rehearsal: The Tempest.
Iris, messenger of the gods, weaving the river
spell through tears because the show goes on.
“Clear, concise, poetic,” wrote the reviewer
of my part, before he panned the rest.
I went home, tore up Johnny’s song, wrote one
and tore it up. If I couldn’t be with him
I wouldn’t be him. I opened the Cambridge edition
of Shakespeare, and told my mother the truth.
I’m starting a poem.
Published in This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems
(Lost Horse Press, 2017). Copyright ©2017 by Carolyne Wright.
© Carolyne Wright
Carolyne Wright’s most recent books are Masquerade, a memoir in poetry (Lost Horse Press, 2021), and This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse, 2017), whose title poem received a Pushcart Prize and appeared in The Best American Poetry. She has nine earlier books and chapbooks of poetry; a ground-breaking anthology, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace (Lost Horse, 2015), which received ten Pushcart Prize nominations; and five award-winning volumes of poetry in translation from Bengali and Spanish—including Map Traces, Blood Traces / Trazas de mapa, trazas de sangre (Mayapple Press, 2017) by Seattle-based Chilean poet, Eugenia Toledo (Finalist, 2018 Washington State Book Award in Poetry, and 2018 PEN Los Angeles Award in Translation). A Contributing Editor for the Pushcart Prizes, Carolyne lived in Chile and traveled in Brazil on a Fulbright Grant; on her return, she studied with Elizabeth Bishop at the University of Washington. Carolyne returned to Brazil in 2018 for an Instituto Sacatar artist’s residency in Bahia. A Seattle native who teaches for Richard Hugo House, she has received grants from the NEA, 4Culture, and the Radcliffe Institute, among others. A Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to Brazil took her back to Salvador, Bahia, in 2022 and 2024.
Carolyne Wright, A Change of Maps (Lost Horse Press, 2006). http://losthorsepress.org/catalog/a-change-of-maps/
Carolyne Wright, This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse Press, 2017): http://www.losthorsepress.org/catalog/this-dream-the-world-new-selected-poems/