I didn’t do much homework when I was in elementary, junior high, or high school, but I did complete the assignments in confirmation classes at the Episcopal church we attended, where I also sang in the choir as a boy soprano. I memorized the General Confession from Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer (thrilling to the cadences of “We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts…. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders”) and I learned by heart the Apostle’s Creed. Here is my creed for being a poet:
I believe in the power of words, and the music of words together,
and the knack for taking things in, being open to impressions,
receptive to what the five senses notice,
and immersion in reading, indulging in daydreams, and jotting
things down in a notebook or journal or smart phone,
and the force of compression, and the value in details,
and the multifarious forms, from strict to free, that a poem
wriggles into and inhabits,
and the song composed for the page, for silent contemplation, to be
read with eyes and ears, even if its chosen form is prose,
and the sound of voices emerging, conversing, arguing,
and the consolation of language amid the animal condition of
mortality and the human condition of worrying about it,
and the joy of entering a musical groove, and the silence of waiting
for another opening,
an orchestra tuning up, the tip of the tongue on the verge of finding
words, names, and phrases that set a draft in motion.
I’m a lapsed Episcopalian now, but I still take Communion if I happen to attend a service, and I still believe in language. Poetry is not a religion, but writing it is certainly a calling. Something wells up in the potential poet. It can take decades, as it did for a kindergarten classmate who was a birdwatcher, growing up in the country, paying attention to her surroundings and tuned into the political disasters of our age. She kept journals, and those notes eventually turned into poems. We reconnected as friends when we both had work accepted for Passager, a marvelous literary magazine for writers over 50.
© John Philip Drury
John Philip Drury is the author of six poetry collections: The Stray Ghost (a chapbook-length sequence), The Disappearing Town, Burning the Aspern Papers, The Refugee Camp, Sea Level Rising, and most recently The Teller’s Cage (Able Muse Press, 2024). His first book of narrative nonfiction, Bobby and Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers, was published by Finishing Line Press in August 2024. After teaching at the University of Cincinnati for 37 years, he is now an emeritus professor and lives with his wife, fellow poet LaWanda Walters, in a hundred-year-old house on the edge of a wooded ravine.
