Original-From: hlwpk!ktw (Kenneth T Wolman +1 201 564 2866)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.words-l
Date:         Mon, 6 Apr 1992 13:30:00 EDT
 <WORDS-L%UGA.bitnet@VTVM2.CC.VT.EDU>
From:         ktw%HLWPK.ATT.COM@VTVM2.CC.VT.EDU
Subject:      Re: Tarmac rugrats
Comments: To: English Language Discussion Group <WORDS-L@uga.cc.uga.edu>

Lisa said...

>When I was in grade school I was teased something fierce.  I won't
>bother to tell you the names I was called because they are too
>personal, even for this list. Now it seems trivial because I am doing
>better in life than those who teased me. I don't forgive them for what
>they did or thank them for giving me the strength to make it through
>life's difficulties.

>If I ever catch my children teasing another, I won't stand for it.  I
>know that I won't be there every moment of there lives but, if I catch
>them.

And Aaron replied....

>I agree COMPLETELY with everything you said.  I wish nothing but death
>on pestilence on everyone who has ever intentionally wronged me, and
>cannot wait for the day I can spit in all their faces.

And I add....

This kind of stuff cuts right through me because I had the same
experience.  I stuttered and it was great fun to make fun of me for
doing so.  Without even being aware of it, I awaited the day I could
exact some form of revenge.  And I did.  I wrote poetry about it: not
when it happened, but in the last two years.  Whether it was good or
not is beside the point.  The fact is someone who runs a small
magazine here in Jersey printed these "stutter poems," including the
one I would call a revenge poem.  Why?  This is part of it:

And I add....

This kind of stuff cuts right through me because I had the same
experience.  I stuttered and it was great fun to make fun of me for
doing so.  Without even being aware of it, I awaited the day I could
exact some form of revenge.  And I did.  I wrote poetry about it: not
when it happened, but in the last two years.  Whether it was good or
not is beside the point.  The fact is someone who runs a small
magazine here in Jersey printed these "stutter poems," including the
one I would call a revenge poem.  Why?  This is it:

THE GIFT OF TONGUES

In my maturity, nostalgia inflated
the past, a parade float held high above a shit-
smeared sidewalk: the Fifties returned, freshly painted,
drawn with care by unseen strings, absorbing light to
dim the present.

		My Fifties don't float: nailed in place
like scenery on a movie set, arc-lit and
undimmed, they have the mass of a recurring dream
where Fonzie is the kid who broke my glasses in
my own hallway: because I was fat, listened to
classical music, and stuttered like an Uzi.

Revisioned, the Fifties reel through my head, blurred
image, except as it focuses before sleep:
for my head was the jerking movie camera
that twitched as I spoke, recording the faces, names
of classmates smirking as I jerked and sprayed the room.
``Take your time'': I heard in mortified teachers' words
what ladies in Victorian England heard in
``Close your eyes and think of your new hat.''  And I did:

endured the unendurable, and I dreamed of
vengeance: for vengeance would be mine, not the God's who
had built my marble-fountain tongue.  I heard Job's wife:
curse God and die.  And I cursed, but I lived: and so
learned his name, and so became as him: as taunters
stand back from Holy Fools, so God fell back from me
to teach me his unspeakable name, to speak it
in tongues of ink: and I took his gift of vengeance
for my own, and blessed the memory he gave me
of their unspeakable names: Steve and Howie, turned
drug addicts; Donny, acidhead with a cheating
wife; Barry, burdened now in middle age with a
retarded brother:

		     Oh classmates who mocked my tongue,
see now how memory overcomes nostalgia,
how my instrument of speech that you derided
--stone no more--takes you out of time, and casts you back,
preserved forever in the stone you mocked as mine.

			Kenneth Wolman, December 3, 1990

The names are real, and I named them.  Now, quality apart, there's a
problem with this approach.  I met Donny's ex-wife last week at a
poetry reading by C. K. Williams at the Paterson Museum.  She writes,
too, it seems.  She hadn't read my stuff--the magazine IS obscure--but
it was, at least in my own head, rather embarrassing, especially since
she told me that she is still in contact with Donny because of their
daughter, and it appears my old classmate is deathly ill.

Magical thinking, anyone?

Ken
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