Wren stood up, took a deep breath with eyes closed, and rang a pair of finger cymbals three times in sequence. She must have borrowed them from Ms. Reese.
All were silent and directed their attention to Wren. Several of the students who had shown up clutched their entry poems nervously, crinkling the pages and clearing their throats. I chose the path of calmness instead. I knew that the poem I held in my hands would garner my entry into this club.
She opened her eyes and spoke. “Welcome everyone and thank you for coming. This is the first meeting of the Henley High Poetry Club. Most of you heard about it in Ms. Reese’s class. We’ll be jamming together, literarily speaking, here at Caffe Trieste every Thursday after school. At the end of the semester we’ll have a showcase performance with everyone’s best work read out loud. The purpose of this club is to become better at writing and to enjoy each other’s work. To have fun, too.”
She looked at Will and they both laughed; I scowled. Will wouldn’t know a good piece of writing if it bit him in the—
“Ms. Reese, an actual published author, will serve as our presiding faculty member. But she is being super-cool about it, letting us all run the meetings ourselves. Remember, this is supposed to be a totally free, creative, artistic expression zone. It’s not school, there are no grades, and there’s no judgment here! We just want to create.”
Carmelita snorted in disbelief. I looked to see if Wren had noticed—it seemed that she hadn’t, but Will was eyeing our section of the room suspiciously. Wren went on.
“So let’s get started. Did everyone bring a first poem to submit?”
There was a rustling of papers as people dug through their bags and passed their poems forward. I smoothed mine out and gave it a last onceover. I had used my Underwood typewriter and this fancy weathered-looking paper that I kept around for special occasions. It was ready for Wren’s eyes, I knew.
Suddenly someone grabbed the paper out of my hand. I looked up to see Will. He smiled a forced smile.
“We don’t have all day, Zivsky.”
My fists clenched slowly but stayed where they were on my lap. This kid had some nerve and was lucky to be dealing with a mellow cat like myself.
“It’s Zivotovsky,” I corrected him, but he had already returned to Wren, who was shaking the pages into a uniformed pile.
“Thank you, thank you, verrrrrry cool. Will, ready?”
He nodded as Wren divided the stack in half and then gave one portion to Will. There was an elongated pause and for a moment I wondered what was going on—until Wren and Will tore their respective stacks into two, then four, then eight and then a million little pieces of paper. All of us in the audience seemed to gasp in horror at the same time.
“Don’t!” yelled Kate Shankar.
“Oh my God—ridiculous,” exclaimed Carmelita.
My heart sank with the awareness that the only copy of the world’s best poem written by me had just been destroyed in front of my own eyes. I had typed it on the Underwood to achieve a greater authenticity, imagining that I would get the paper back at some point. Now it was lost to history. No wonder Carmelita always wrote on her laptop.
Three kids who were part of the music scene at Henley stood up and grabbed their jackets. Two of them shrugged at each other and left; the other stayed behind when Will shot him a disapproving look.
He and Wren gathered up the bits of paper and put them into a garbage bag. Wren smiled.
“You might be wondering why we did that.”
“You bet we are. That was the only poem I brought with me,” Kate snarked.
“Well, here’s why,” Wren answered. “See that photo over there?”
She pointed to a curling poster on the far wall of the cafe. It was a popular one, available for purchase at City Lights Bookstore, with an image of young Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady together. I had always loved that image.
“Jack and Neal and the Beat Poets worked by the philosophy of ‘first thought, best thought.’”
This was true; I wondered, though, if any of them had ever been forced to watch their own work torn up in front of them.
“So that’ll be our main creative creed here,” Wren continued, “and we’re only going to write instant poetry. We’re doing away with drafts.”
This I liked; drafts and I did not get along. Would Ms. Reese be a supporter of this, though? It seemed to me that we spent a lot of her classes in peer review sessions, which led to the construction of two drafts and sometimes even three.
“Every week, every meeting,” Will added, “we’ll each write a new poem in twenty minutes without editing, and then we’ll share them with each other. Let’s do that now, in fact.”
Will passed out paper and pens. Carmelita took them but didn’t start writing; instead, she looked around at all of us and at Wren in disbelief.
“Why did we have to bring in a new poem just for it to be destroyed? Was that really necessary?”
Wren looked uncomfortable but didn’t answer. Car spoke to the group again.
“You’re all gonna go in for this, everybody? Crazy antics done in the name of creativity?”
“Come on, Car,” Tyler interjected. “We’re here. We ought to give it a shot. It’ll be an interesting experiment in any case.”
Carmelita seized a pen and paper and started to write. I grabbed my pen. After several moans of annoyance, the room grew quiet as people started to write. What were they writing about? It didn’t matter; I had to focus here and now. What ideas did I have filed away, ideas that I could use now? I threw my fishing line into the cool mountain stream that was my creative zone, but nothing seemed to be swimming there at the moment. I truly felt that I had put all of my creative energy into writing the poem that I wrote last night. I never imagined in a million years that I would get there and have to write another one! This was starting to feel like taking an exam—an exam that I hadn’t studied for. I began to panic.
Suddenly I inhaled a fresh scent of lilac and looked up to see Wren smiling at me. She seemed to give off a glow of calm and positivity at all times. I tried to soak up some of it myself, thinking that it would help me in my writing. She carried a stack of paper cups and a pitcher with some kind of purplish iced drink inside.
“Chamomile-lavender iced tea? I made it myself. I always drink it when I’m writing. It helps for relaxation and lets the best ideas rise to the surface.”
I hoped to Jack Kerouac’s ghost that she was right and poured myself a large glass. Perhaps this entire setup, perhaps the surprise poetry pop quiz, had been established by Wren as a sort of romantic test of chivalry, an opportunity for me to prove my worthiness to her. Yes, yes, I thought as I looked at Tyler furrowing his brow over pages, and Carmelita writing furiously, hunched over the table. Yes, this was the only explanation.
Well, I wouldn’t disappoint her. I took another glance at Wren across the room. The fibers on her gold scarf caught the rays of afternoon sun that streamed through the window. She laughed melodically as Tyler whispered something in her ear—what, I couldn’t tell. She pushed his arm playfully and I felt my anger rising. No, I wouldn’t disappoint her at all.
Just like that, the words came. One after another after another. Each sentence seemed to have a rhythm and the timing was perfect—the second that the feeling came to me, my mind was right there to articulate it and my hand was there to pen it. This went on and on for what seemed like forever, but I kept writing. My hand ached from gripping the ballpoint, whose ink was running dry. I didn’t second-guess any word or line that I chose—there wasn’t time. This, I realized, this was how Jack must have felt when he threw forth On the Road to that winding scroll of paper—at one with the forces of the universe. This feeling was why I had chosen to be a writer.
The finger-cymbals clanged once again and Will spoke.
“All right guys, it’s time to put the pens down and pass your papers forward. Give thanks for the awesome words that you’ve written and send them up here!”
We all turned our pages in as Wren and Will began to leaf through them, stopping here and there to look more closely at a rhyme or phrase. I looked around the cafe; the other patrons seemed to have left. One forlorn-looking barista wiping the countertop remained. The same low-key jazz music played; funny that I hadn’t heard it while I was writing. Probably a good sign; I must have been focusing to the utmost degree.
“That was intense, man,” Tyler said to me. “Not sure that I like the whole ‘surprise’ angle. I do not like to be rushed, you know? But we shall see.”
He yawned and stretched his legs out in front of him. Carmelita played tic-tac-toe with Kate on some of the extra paper but she didn’t look too enthusiastic. Then Will spoke and our attention was drawn back to the poem-sorting.
“Hey everyone, this work all looks really fantastic. There’s one in particular . . . We should read it out loud, I guess.”
Wren had pulled one piece of paper from the pile.
“There’s one poem here that we think is just so super-great, and most definitely in the spirit of the Beats and Jack,” she said. “I’m going to read it out loud as a stellar example of what we want in this club—if that’s okay with the author. Hunter, do you mind?”
I was speechless; I hadn’t expected this, either. I felt my face get a bit flushed again—and at my moment of glory, too.
“Nah, I don’t mind,” I replied, keeping my cool. I was aware that most of the heads in the room were turned toward me but I tried not to care and just focused on Wren. She began to read:
“new to me
new in town
flavors of fevers from the word go
flowers in her hair were enough to catch me
to get up to that house on the hill . . .”
Hearing Wren speak the words that I had just written made me feel like I was dreaming. Every once in a while as she moved through the stanzas she would look up and out into the audience. Every once in a while she would catch my eye. Her eyebrows raised as her voice paused and then restarted, grew louder and quieter, quickened its speed and then slowed down. She read it with a jazzed-up sense of rhythm that the Beats would have been proud of.
When she finished, everyone clapped, even Will—though reluctantly so.
“Well, our hour is up and we have to get the heck out of the Caffe now,” Wren said. “But we hope to see you all back here next week, when we’ll have some discussion about our first poems from today, and write more new ones. Also if anyone hasn’t read Howl by Allen Ginsberg, we suggest reading it before next week. It’s not too long and is more or less essential to have read in order to be a San Franciscan poet.”
“She isn’t a San Franciscan poet; she’s not from here,” Carmelita said under her breath. People began to gather their jackets and books and head for the door.
“Uh . . . hold on a second . . . Carmelita?”
Will stopped her as she headed for the door. “Can I talk to you a second?” he asked and motioned to a corner of the cafe. Carmelita went along but seemed to be suspicious. I was about to head over there too but was stopped by Wren.
“Hey there. I love love loved your poem, Hunter. You’re an incredible writer. I’m glad you’re doing this with us.”
I looked off to the side for dramatic effect.
“Well thanks, thanks a lot. I am too. Whatever you put in that tea, it works.”
Wren laughed and fiddled with the sleeve of my Army jacket. She spoke in a singsong voice and kind of looked at the floor as she went on.
“Well, anytime you want more, I’d be happy to supply it. I’m making it for my Dad’s book party on Saturday night, in fact.”
I’d always wanted to go to a book party. From what I could tell, it was an event when the author invited all of his pals to an over-the-top celebration for the release of his new book.
“I didn’t know that your dad had a new book coming out.”
“Yeah, he’s been working on this one for a while. Maybe . . . well, you might have plans . . . ”
“I don’t have plans,” I replied back, way too quickly. This coolness thing was hard to manage.
“Well, great. Do you think you can come? It starts at seven.”
I paused for a moment so as not to seem too eager.
“Um . . . yeah, I think I can make it.”
Wren smiled. Was it just my imagination, or did she seem a bit nervous too?
“Lovely.”
She hesitated for a moment and then pulled a Carmelita. Wren kissed me on the cheek. And suddenly Carmelita was at my side, speaking.
“Are you ready to go yet? Tyler and I can’t really wait around all night.”
Car didn’t seem mad, but there was something in her eyes that I hadn’t really seen before.
I cleared my throat and followed her to the door.
“Bye!” Wren mouthed to me through the window as we left.
I was over the moon. But as we walked toward the BART stop to head back to Berkeley, I could tell that something was wrong with Car.
“So, that was pretty cool, right? What did you guys think?”
Both of them were silent for a moment.
Tyler spoke first. “I’ll say one thing’s for sure: those two really go in for theatrics.”
“Well,” I explained, “the Beat poets were into speaking their work out loud. The performance of the work mattered. They probably went in for theatrics too.”
Tyler shook his head. “I don’t know, man—tearing up our work right in front of us? It would be one thing if they were Mr. Kim’s dumb Trig work-sheets, but they were poems. More . . . sensitive, you know? That part seemed, well, nutso.”
Carmelita looked a bit faraway in the eyes.
“I think that they were just trying to get us amped up, excited, you know? What did you think, Car?”
At my question she focused and asked, “It was about her, wasn’t it?”
Tyler jumped in. “Oh yeah, Hunter, your poem was awesome. Really great. Can’t wait to hear your next one.”
“Hunter?” Carmelita prompted.
I wished she’d leave it alone; I didn’t want to talk about it. It felt private. I didn’t like hiding things from Carmelita, but I wanted to keep Wren and how I felt about her to myself. I hastily formed a response.
“Ah well, you know, writers are inspired by all different stuff, all of the time. Especially poetry. It doesn’t always make sense, Car. I just went with . . . what came to me.”
We had reached the station and were now waiting on the platform. The next train was due in one minute. Carmelita lightly touched my arm.
“But, ‘flowers in her hair’? ‘New in town,’ ‘house on the hill’? That’s all Wren.”
I looked down at my sneakers, not sure what to say. Had it been that obvious? If I’d had a chance to review it, I might have tried to be more ambiguous about the idea of the poem. But Wren had been standing right in front of me—what else should I have been inspired by?
“Come on, Carmelita. That’s not ‘all Wren,’ it’s just whatever, all right? It’s from me, from my own mind, my own pen and paper. Give me more credit than that. I never write so literally.”
Car still eyed me curiously with the same sadness; Tyler said nothing.
The train came whooshing into the station. We boarded and found three seats together. Carmelita closed her eyes and rested her head on Tyler’s shoulder.
She usually did that with me.