NaPoWriMo Day 22: "Dear Joan Baez"

Today's NaPoWriMo prompt: "Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that engages with another art form – it might be about a friend of yours who paints or sculpts, your high school struggles with learning to play the French horn, or a wonderful painting, film, or piece of music you’ve experienced – anything is in bounds here, so long as it uses the poem to express something about another form of art."

Today's PAD Challenge prompt:  "For today’s prompt, write a correspondence poem. Maybe write a poem that would fit on a postcard or in a letter. Or write a poem about correspondence school. Or jump into newer forms of correspondence like e-mail or text messaging. Of course, not all correspondence is connected to communicating; sometimes one thing corresponds to another by being similar."

My admiration for and identification with Joan Baez when I was around ten years old (not that I've ever really lost it) came back to me in a prompt-writing group last weekend. What hit me strongly for the first time then was how instinctively I knew myself; while I did not continue to want to me a musical performer, there is so much in her songs and singing and persona that resonates for me as a poet, a kind of lyrical correspondence (come to think of it) I continue to want to embody. It's a prose poem today; I wanted that kind of run-on rhythm.

Dear Joan Baez “I was born gifted,” you said. I wanted to be, maybe I was. You were what I loved before poetry. The first concert I ever went to, with my mother, where was that in New York. The records were my parents’ but I played them again and again. My cousin Phoebe taught me guitar. I tried to write folk songs so I could sing like you; “She’s sinking, she’s sinking, the Mary Queen of Scots” went the one I still recall. I recall how my classmates went still and listened, that one time in fifth grade. I wanted a dark and serious beauty. I did not want to date Bob Dylan. I vibrated to what was old and strange and full of longing. If I knew what justice was, of course I longed for it. I wanted it not through arguing but through the sounds that would ring in my throat. I wanted to stun the world with listening. Decades later I think how neither of us are exactly white, not when the lines are drawn. You knew where the lines were drawn. You knew what matters is which side are you on. You said the first gift was having the voice and the second was wanting to share it.

This record cover; oh my, such a piece of memory.

--Draft by Anne Myles. Do not copy, cite, or quote without permission.