ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It seems the success of my fiction in my lifetime has overshadowed the fact that I was once a poet. I still am.

I began my literary path in the sixth grade under the light of a lay teacher at Saint Aloysius Elementary School in Chicago. I wrote in secret in a composition book with a spiral spine. Mrs. Something was my teacher’s name. Her real name has disappeared like the school. But it was Mrs. Something who believed I was remarkable, and this love transformed me from pumice to obsidian.

Elizabeth Dacenko was only a few years older than I when she taught me poetry my sophomore year at Josephinum High School in Chicago. I don’t know if in her lifetime she knew she was the first to out me as a writer. She knows now.

In my twenties, while working on my first novel, I gave birth to a poetry chapbook, Bad Boys, midwifed by California poets Gary Soto and Lorna Dee Cervantes as part of their Chicano Chapbook Series. Published by Lorna’s Mango Press in a limited edition of five hundred copies, it sold for one dollar and was distributed from a big bag I strapped across my shoulder. A chapbook, for those who don’t know, is a small book of about a dozen pages, usually bound together with two staples in the center. Gary says he remembers the Mango Press stapler didn’t work properly, and he was obliged to hand-bend each staple shut with a kitchen spoon on a kitchen table. This seems to me poetic justice since the poems had been written on a kitchen table too.

Bad Boys contained a slender selection of poetry, all from my MFA graduate thesis and all reproduced later in my first full-length book, My Wicked Wicked Ways, published in 1987 by visionary Norma Alarcón’s Third Woman Press. It was after the release of Wicked Ways that it occurred to me that publishing poetry was the antithesis of writing poetry. I wrote poetry because I had to push a truth out from my womb. Publishing felt as if I was celebrating the messy afterbirth. June Jordan’s Things I Do in the Dark described what poetry was all about for me. I needed to write poetry, but I felt uncomfortable sharing it. After Wicked, I went back to writing in secret and stashing my poems under the bed like Miss Emily.