Why I'm Participating in Tupelo Press' 30/30 Fundraiser
Dear Friends,
As I told you in my last email, I will be participating this month in Tupelo Press’ 30/30 Fundraiser, which is, basically, the small press version of a walkathon. Each month, a different group of poets volunteers to write 30 poems in 30 days, while others sponsor them by donating to the press. To read the poems I and my fellow October 30/30 poets are posting, click here. A new poem will be posted every day of the month.
I'd like to tell you a little bit about why I chose to be part of this effort.
This is three-year-old me decked out in my red suspenders, favorite shirt, shoes that I thought were the coolest, and the smallest size Lee’s children's jeans my mother could find in the Lee’s store on Northern Boulevard around the corner from my grandparents' house. (Obviously they were too big for me; just look at the size of those cuffs!)
Mr. Davis, the man who owned the store, was a close family acquaintance, and my mother had gotten it into her head that I would make a great model for those jeans. She figured that if she could put together a good enough set of pictures, Mr. Davis might use me in an advertising campaign, or something like that. So she dressed me in that outfit and took me out in back of our building, where she shot a lot of pictures. No matter how hard she tried, though, she couldn’t get me to stand still long enough for the Lee’s label just above my young butt to be clearly visible in the frame of the picture. My modeling career was over before it started.
Still, even if things had worked out according to my mother’s plan—who knows the kind of life I might have led if modeling had indeed been in my future!—I like to think I would’ve become a poet anyway. Because what poetry has given me is something I don’t want to imagine my life without: a way of speaking (when I write it) and of hearing (when I read it) truths about myself and the world that it would be difficult at best to say any other way. On a personal level, those truths are rooted in my experience as a survivor of childhood sexual violence. On a more global level, they emerge from the connections I hope never to stop exploring between that experience and what it means to live a meaningful and ethical life, in the broadest and most inclusive sense of those terms.
I have always believed that poetry does its work in the world slowly, one poem, one book, one reader at a time. Certainly this has been my experience, both in terms of how my books and my poems have moved through the world and in terms of the work poetry has done in me, which would have been impossible without small presses like Tupelo and the books they publish. That’s why I accepted their invitation to participate in the 30/30 project. It’s one way I can give back to a community that has given me so much.
Again, to read the poems I and my fellow October poets are posting, click here.
If you’ve been a supporter of my work in the past, if poetry in general is important to you, please go to my fundraising page and give as generously as you are able. I’ve set a modest fundraising goal, $400, because I believe in under promising and over delivering. I hope you will help me over deliver for this very worthy cause.
With gratitude and respect,
Richard