Grab Bag: Notes on a Poem

I really don't want to make a huge deal about my poem, Eastward Ho, that was recently published by The Montucky Review. I certainly never expected to publish a poem; I know how bad most of my attempts at the form truly are. But now that an editor has seen something in the work, my wife, Angie, suggested that I give a little background on it.

So here goes …

I spent my first summer in Montana drinking beer and making stupid faces. Pretty much how I've spent every summer since.

I wrote it in the early fall of 2006, just months after I'd moved to Montana from California to start my life here with Ang. I'd made the trip here that June with a bit of money in the bank, and I figured I could float along for the better part of a year, if I had to, without finding full-time work. As it turned out, I was in town less than a month before something opened up at The Billings Gazette, and so I was back on the job fairly quickly.

The poem, whether it's obvious or not, was the result of some conflicting feelings I had about my situation — personal and professional. Between the time I started my career in earnest in the early '90s and the time I came to Montana, I'd been married to my work — pouring my energy and my passion into journalism. When I came to Montana, that changed. I still enjoy working with words and designing pages and the thrill of a big breaking story, and I still hold myself to a high standard of work, but my arrival here was driven, at least in part, by the sudden realization, at age 36, that work would never love me back. And I now had someone in my life whom I'd never let in before, someone who would love me back.

That was the dynamic at work as I wrote the poem, the letting go of a job as the most important thing in my life and the embracing of another human being in that role. Marriage has not been easy, mostly because I'm not an easy person, but this I can say with all conviction: I've never regretted the trade.