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My first reading group is established during the first week of first grade at Davidsonville Elementary School, and our teacher is sensitive to the fact that I already had the ability to sound out and decode small words; because of this, she encouraged to read the the Richard Scarry books in the classroom during the course of the day if I finished my work ahead of time. I nerd out on them almost every day, and seeing my interest, my teacher convinces my parents to let me sign up for a book club
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My third- grade year. Attracted by the fanciful full-color illustrations on its cover, I pick up a copy of D’eualaire’s Book of Greek Mythology. I renew it as often as I possibly can during the rest of the rest of year, because I’m totally immersed in that universe, leading me to read The Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which was written so descriptively that no illustrations were needed to create vivid mental pictures. I began to seek books that really bothered my mind from then on.
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My fifth-grade year. My mother buys me a paperback copy of The Hobbit not more than a week after we'd seen the televised animated version of it. It served as the introduction to the Lord of the Rings series, the most elaborate fictional universe ever constructed in fantasy literature, and conveyed a primal, untamed sort of feeling about it, in a very urgent, immediate way, bypassing the intellect and tugging straight at my imagination, creating a yearning to be transported to that world.
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My fifth-grade year, continued . I check out the children’s novel Bridge to Terabithia from the Annapolis Library. The main characters went nuts with their imaginations, slipping into a a state of magically heightened reality, and conjured up a kind of pocket-universe, fantasy realm described in third-person narration focusing on a boy with visionary impulses on the verge of adolescence who’s just beginning to develop a sense of grown-up awareness, and a cruising altitude for his identity.
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The book is also notable for focusing upon the death of a child and the impact of its aftermath on the survivors, written in such an honest, realistic manner that it captured the the true-to-life essence of what it’s like to be a child developing an identity in the midst of personal upheavals that it was just positively haunting, maintaining that level of intensity from first page to the last, and left me overcome with emotion, the first time I'd ever been touched that deeply by a book I'd read.
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This is done in order to interpret what that evidence is showing so that a short argumentative response can be written to support or refute an assertion posed by the question. This was a big deal, because it took me beyond acquiring and integrating knowledge to extending and refining it, then applying it meaningfully. Before I was introduced to these I coasted along and gave correct but superficial answers, and these questions taught me how to think about the way I thought.
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My senior-year guidance counselor altered my schedule and enrolled me in two Advanced Placement History classes, US and Modern European. In order to sit for the AP exams in that subject a it was necessary to correctly answer document based questions (DBQ's). Several primary real-world documents are laid out in a way that asks the reader to use their own background knowledge and their capacity to analyze a historical event or issue in order to interpret what that evidence is showing.
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My junior year of college, at the University of Baltimore, and I discovered an anthology containing several of Dylan Thomas’s most famous, universally recognizable poems. “ And Death Shall Have No Dominion”, “The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower”, “Fern Hill”, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”, and “After the Funeral” contained a lot of vivid imagery, so much so that they had kind of a surreal, almost hallucinogenic quality to them, following a kind of dreamlike logic.
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It was the first time I’d ever read poetry which promoted a visionary experience, encompassing life, the universe, and everything; the kind that can literally raise hackles and goosebumps on your forearms as you read each poem, and delivers insight(s) into the reality of your surroundings or a way of perceiving reality that had never occurred to you before, but will stay etched in your mind going forward the moment, after you read it in language having a cadence that was positively hypnotic.
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Her poems addressed ordinary issues of life rather than semi-mystical topics in a sensitive, insightful manner, with cleverly turned phrasing. It was immediately accessible and very impassioned, and sometimes reading it caused to resonate with me on a level that created an ache of meditative longing. It also sparked within me an awareness that I might be capable of writing poetry, something that I thought beforehand would always be removed from my capability as a writer to do.
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Michael Guiliano taught a section of a composition course universally required for students of all majors to take, and had us read the poem “A Woman Mourned by Daughters”, written by Adrienne Rich. She had a vivid, precise way of writing that differed from Dylan Thomas’s in that she was able to express herself through verse using the rhythms of natural speech, much harder to execute successfully then it sounds like it would be.
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This required the facts in the case to be memorized and largely rendered in the student’s own words, meaning that a massive amount of information had to be narrowed down into an easily retrievable store of knowledge. I summarized in annotations what I read paragraph by paragraph, and in my own words, previewing for key words and phrases around which to organize the knowledge into notes that would be easily digestible and capable of retaining beyond the level of flash memorization.
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My undergraduate major was Political Science. I was required to take a Constitutional Law class. All exams in this course were essays, to be discussed as if they were legal opinions, and participation grades on the class were based upon accurately and concisely summarizing the week’s reading if called upon in class. No other way of expressing knowledge was recognized.
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My winter break still in effect for another couple of weeks, I sat down to write my first poem which I titled “Novitiate”. I was curious about what a poet who’d been published several times in the university’s literary magazine thought about it, and shyly approached him with it in my hand. He read it, looked at me, read it again, and told me to submit it to the poetry section of the school newspaper. It got accepted. It got noticed. I got asked to submit anything else I wrote, going forward.
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Now whatever gave him that idea?
"really, my boy"
he said
"you're not being persecuted"
but the older boys had caught him unaware, again.
"they're just used to playing roughly"
he said
but they'd left behind an angry mass of scratches,
and bruises, and indentations,
tattooed abruptly, upon any exposed skin
to mark their coming, and their going,
and to promise their return. -
And the level of external validation I received from it was something I’d never experienced before with my writing,which had served an academic purpose only up until that point in time. I was approached by the editor of the literary magazine, who asked me to submit it to him so that he could publish it, and all of it came from scratching a creative itch. I’m still writing poetry for pleasure 30 years later, and can’t imagine the creative outlet it gives me not being part of my life.
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During the course of writing these reviews, I was contacted to review for another site (that’s since folded) in exchange for free downloads of that music, This meant that I didn’t have to pay anything for new music from the way-out-of-the-mainstream bands I listened to the most, quite literally an external reward for doing what I loved to do anyway, and was asked to join a group of like-minded reviewers who turned me onto bands that had flown onto my radar. In conclusion, this is the end.
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My favorite thing to do while on a lunch break at work when in my 20’s was to read music reviews in all sort of magazines. Before the advent of YouTube or streaming platforms, a music magazine is where you often made contact with a band or solo artist’s music first. I ordered my music through Amazon, and read reviews before buying anything. I read a review that I disagreed with so vehemently that I had to calm myself down, before my eyeballs popped out on their stalks in a fit of spasmodic rage.
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And while I wasn’t close to being agitated enough to wonder if the person needed to be beaten severely about the head and shoulders, have their forehead whaled upon, or their ears boxed, it did make me feel strongly enough to leave my own review, which got upvoted.The upvotes were nice, but I began to review my entire CD collection (220+) because it gave me a lot of pleasure. There was nothing like playing the candyman to a new generation of listeners who hadn't grown up with the music I did.
