Comp Lit by Erik Reece

Comp Lit

My middle school English teacher mounted a long dark paddle,
drilled with holes, over the chalkboard in front of his class.
He called it the Black Death or the Black Mariah, or something
like that. We had thick orange grammar books out of which
we endlessly diagrammed sentences, knowing that a misdirected
participle might mean the application of that heinous paddle to
our hind end. Somehow, I came to love literature anyway. I came
to love words like susurration and Ohio. When I discovered
the poet Anna Ahkmatova, I loved that her name meant daughter
of the oaks, a name she invented because her father didn’t want
a poet in the family. What father does? Mine seemed perplexed,
eternally so, each Sunday morning by the furious rebuttals I wrote
on the church program to our pastor’s innocuous sermons.
Two years later, it was a short drive to a drunk driving charge
after I flailed along to the Fleshtones one night at Café LMNOP.
Friends from the college paper couldn’t go my bail, so I sat
in a cell till morning and said over and over, Anna Ahkmatova,
as if she might come through the walls, as if I was her lost son
shivering in a Russian prison under false arrest. Such, I’m afraid,
was the grandiose self-pity of my youth. It didn’t serve me well.
My passion for John Berryman convinced a Rhodes Scholar
to sleep with me once, after I drank all the liquor in her house,
but it didn’t stop the trimmers when I landed in an unironic rehab
called The Ledge. I quit reading John Berryman. I quit living
like John Berryman. I quit thinking that my father’s suicide
was a door he left open for me. I gave up the long day’s journey
into oblivion and shame. Now I just like to recite Issa’s poem:
The man pulling radishes   /   pointed my way   /   with a radish.
There’s a pretty easy sentence to diagram, and it makes me smile
to think about those pink radishes dangling from a farmer’s hand
as he sent the poet off along the road of his enduring loneliness,
always craving the one thing that might bring an end to craving.

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Erik Reece is the author of six books of nonfiction, including Utopia Drive and Lost Mountain, which won Columbia University’s John B. Oakes Award for Outstanding Environmental Writing. His prose and poetry have appeared in Harper’s, The Oxford American, the Atlantic, Orion, and elsewhere. His collection of poems, Kingfisher Blues, was published this year by the University Press of Kentucky. He teaches writing at the University of Kentucky and is the founder of Kentucky Writers and Artists for Reforestation.