Penpal

I used to be a serious penpal. I had quite a few penpals. Then the number came down to a handful. I wrote them religiously all through my teen years. Before poems, before diaries, before plays, before stories, before novels, I wrote letters. I told my life in letters and I relished discovering the lives of my penpals in letters. I enjoyed the secretive nature of the letters. No one near me was going to read the
letters. I could make up things, I could work hard to be completely truthful.

I wrote alone, in my room while my younger brother was asleep or minding his own business somewhere. I liked addressing the envelope, putting on the stamp. I wrote with a fountain pen, in those days, because that is what we used at school. I did everything to make sure that my writing was legible. I did not want any confusion. I would count the weeks before the reply would come, the final evidence that what I had written had arrived at the home of my penpal and had been opened and read. I loved to receive the replies. I would take the letter to my room, weighing its thickness and anticipating a long read.
I would read, slowly, page after page. These were penpals, but the excitement of the exercise was like falling in love. My penpals were all girls. There is a reason why. I had penpals to make up for the absence of a steady girlfriend in my life. So the subtext of all these letters was the myth of romance—a kind of managing of the urge to break into something lewd, something honest about where my hormone addled brain was. But I learned discipline. I learned to be a friend, to troll for secrets, to get that sentence that I would cherish, “I have never told anyone this—you are the only person I could say this to, not even
my boyfriend would understand.” Jackpot! Cheap pleasure, but I enjoyed
this business of writing my world on the page to reach into the imagination of someone who had never seen my world.
So each day during the hiatus between letters—the waiting two and half weeks for a letter to come from Salisbury, Rhodesia or from Kent in England, I would collect material. I would see the world from the eyes of a writer recording images, moments, thoughts in preparation for the period of letter writing. My ritual was always to first respond to her letter, and then embark of new territory—always take the discussion somewhere else. I would always ask a question, or two questions, just so that she would have something to write in her reply—so that she would not say, “I don’t know what to write, what to say.” This act of collecting must have become ingrained in my, a kind of involuntary thing that I now do without thought, without any awareness of what I am doing.
These days, therefore, I have been admitting a lot that I am a collector—an indiscriminate collector who has come to rely entirely on the unconscious to determine what to keep and what to discard, what will be useful and what will be useless. I rarely ever look at the world and say, “Hey, that would make for a good poem” and mean that I will write that poem. What I am usually saying is that somebody should write a poem about that. Typically, if it has already found its way into my consciousness, it is doomed. Part of the problem is that the world is moving too fast for me, and most of what I am contending with is
absolutely mundane and ordinary. I am collecting, but I am not aware of what I am collecting. When I come to the page, however, the mind manages to recall some things and ignore other things. There is this wonderful way in which allusions, memories, aromas, feelings, objects, find their way back and seem to find a place in the poem. It sometimes makes me giddy, as if you are making magic with words, conjuring up the unusual and unexpected. But I must be collecting, day by day, picking up this and that, editing things out, keeping the juicy bits, filling that database.
I suppose I am saying that the art of letter writing and the impulses it creates in the writer and reader are what I offer as an explanation for why I write and how I write. I am always aware of the fact that what I am writing is going to somebody. I am always aware of the fact that I am using language to construct my world in very clear and specific ways. I am always aware, also, that I have to rely on the material I have collected to keep my art interesting. My great fear is that the mail box will remain empty, that no one will reply, that no one will even read what I have written. That silence is haunting. Unsettling. Every poem, then, is something of a letter—one that will be tested by the reader. The test will not be for veracity, not for accuracy of detail, but for its capacity to move them to write, to somehow respond in someway, to want to write back.
This is a metaphor, yes, because I don’t expect people who read my work to literally write back to me. But this blog, as it turns out, has introduced a brand new set of problems. I am writing now, and now someone may write. Not in a week. Not in two weeks. But in the next hour, the next 10 minutes. And I am terrified by the prospect that I will just not have enough time to collect all that I will need to write again.
Have you ever had a penpal? If you have, what was the longest stretch you went for with your correspondence?
Now you have no excuse . . .