I sat in a coffee shop attached to Sears Department Store on the corner of State and Madison in downtown Chicago. It was Valentine’s Day, my freshman year of college, and I was not with a date. Rather I was with Jake, my former high school English teacher who was taking me to my first opera that evening, Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. We sat there, on the second story of the coffee shop, overlooking the street below, and Jake read me a poem. I was not expecting much. I did not like poetry, and I was grieving the loss of my father. Sensations were deadened; the subtle beauties of poetry were lost on me. Yet when Jake read the poem, I felt a spark of something small inside. “Who is that?”

“W.H. Auden. The poem is called ‘Musée des Beaux Arts,’” Jake replied. I asked him to read it again. He did. Then I asked to see the book. I read the poem to myself. “He’s right. Nobody cares.” Eager to regain the only companion who could relate to my grief, I bought Auden’s Selected Poems the next week. My first book of lyric poetry.

*

As a child, reading always played a visible role in my life. Until I was thirteen years old, my evangelical mother read the Bible to me every night before I went to bed, using an illustrated children’s Bible and then moving on to the actual Bible when I turned eleven. In elementary school when I started to read on my own, a year later than my peers, I gravitated to the Berenstein Bears series. As I entered my teens, I read science fiction, Agatha Christie mysteries, and Michael Crichton thrillers. These works were soon supplanted by those of modern novelists—Camus, Fitzgerald, Nabokov, and Huxley—in addition to what was required of me at school. But despite the considerable amount of reading I did, I have almost no recollection of reading poetry. Only a few incidents stand out.

In second or third grade, I stumbled across my sister’s Shel Silverstein volumes. They amused me, although now I only remember two of the poems—the book-length poem, The Giving Tree, which I found particularly tragic, and his poem “Sick,” from the book Where the Sidewalk Ends. The poem is a monologue by a young hypochondriac, Peggy Ann McKay, in which she tries to convince a parent that she is too sick to go to school. Then she finds out that it is actually Saturday. A resentful student, I thought Silverstein’s poem incredible, if for no other reason than I wanted to miss school myself. This poem, which I can still recite from memory, was the only positive reading experience I had with poetry until I was in college. The only other memory I have of reading poetry prior to college was as a senior in high school. My class read Emily Dickinson’s “I like to see it lap the miles.” I am sure that I read other poetry—certainly Poe and Whitman—but I do not remember. The only reason that I remember Dickinson’s poem is because I thought it was odd that someone would write a poem about trains.

Poetry, for me, was a cryptic language, something that took far too much effort for what it yielded–a sort of Finnegan’s Wake. It probably did not help that my only encounter with poetry was in school, where English teachers force-fed the stuff. Maybe my reaction was as much a reaction against school as it was against poetry. If I was introduced to poetry outside of school as I was with all the authors that I enjoyed, maybe I would have been keen on it. This was impossible, though. No one in my home read poetry. In fact, though I have looked through the thousands and thousands of books that my family owns—most of them volumes on psychology, business, medicine, or Biblical studies—I have come across only two books of poetry, T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems and The Book of Folly by Anne Sexton. When I found the books as a sophomore in college and asked about them, my mother explained that she had been assigned the Eliot poetry for a class in college. She doesn’t remember any of his poems. No one knows where the Ann Sexton came from.

While I have no real memory of reading poetry during this period of my life, I apparently wrote quite a bit in school. I recently stumbled across a folder of my writing from the age of nine or ten to twelve which included several poems among the narratives and short stories. All of the poems exhibit a sense of melancholy and self-aggrandizement. I was in sixth grade when I wrote “Understanding”:

I do not understand
How Jordan dunks a basketball,
Or why people shot Lincoln.
But the things I do not understand most are
How the body works,
Why people think I am a genius,
And why teachers say I am disorganized.
Things I understand the most are,
How I think and sometimes act,
Baseball
And boredom.

I didn’t enjoy writing poetry, though. Many of the poems display a disdain for English class. At the bottom of one poem, I drew a picture of a door with the words “reading class” above it. Then I scrawled the word “yuck.” I suppose I became slightly more interested in poetry during high school, not directly, but through lyrics. I formed a band with some friends of mine (I was the bass player), and they dubbed me the lead singer. The love affair was short-lived, though. I wrote one song; I sat down at my computer and typed it in ten minutes. I distinctly recall writing the words “maybe I’m just menstruating” to convey some adolescent isolation I was then feeling. That didn’t go across so well: “Do you really want to sing the word ‘menstruating’?” asked the drummer, eyebrows furrowed as he glanced over the lyrics. I didn’t write anything after that. When Jake, then a fresh college graduate and the teacher of my sophomore English class, asked his students to write poems, I convinced a friend to write one for me. He played the guitar. He must be able to write poetry, I reasoned. So it was that I came to college knowing almost no poetry. I had given up on it.

*

I showed up at college with the intention of going on to medical school. That fall I slogged through chemistry and calculus. Then, my father died. It was a quick affair. He was diagnosed with cancer in late October. He was dead three and a half weeks later. I buried my head in chemistry problems because I did not want to think about his death. The sterility of chemical laws and the periodic table is a wonderful sedative—temporarily.

After Christmas, I returned to the snow-covered campus and to a desk in a room where I sat alone with my grief. I plummeted into depression. The dorm was alive; the boys in the room next door played video games frantically, yelling loudly when they killed their 128-bit victims. Friends talked about dates and about classes and about plans for the summer. I trudged to class and to counseling and to health centers for psychiatric care and back to my room. I started to withdraw from people. In my “small group”—an odd phenomenon of the Evangelical sub-culture in which people share far too much of their lives and then talk about Jesus—I would sit silently, declining to pray with the others. I was alone. In an essay I wrote a year later, I returned to “Musée des Beaux Arts” to describe my depression:

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Bruegel.

“Like most of my friends, God had turned his back on my suffering, and like the expensive ship in Bruegel’s Icarus, life sailed on, never stopping to help the boy falling out of the sky or to let me wipe the tears from my eyes. He had died so quickly that I never figured out what happened; I was left at the foot of my father’s hospital bed.”

*

Butterfly: “Too much light shines outside / And too much laughing spring. / [pointing to the windows] Close them.” A few minutes later, Butterfly takes a dagger and stabs herself in the heart. In the production that I saw, she pulls out a long red streamer, the blood flowing onto the pagoda floor. The curtain falls. Tears welled up in my eyes. It was that night at the coffee shop and at the opera, almost three months after my father died, that I first fell in love with poetry.