The Land Of Weak Signals always provokes a strange kind of introspection for me.

I have known many people who have spent the bulk of their lives trying to get away from the places they came from, whereas these days I feel increasingly like I'm trying to live my life in such a way as to eventually get myself back to the place I came from. I feel like a part of my heart has always remained behind there, and that I can feel it calling me home. Each time I visit, I find myself wondering if that will change, if whatever elemental or sentimental connection I feel to that place will ever grow weaker with distance or be severed by time. It hasn't happened yet. I'm starting to suspect that it never will. I am, at the end of the day, a sentimental guy.

When I was in grade school back in The Land Of Weak Signals, I used to write poetry all the time. I'd write my poems on sheets of lined paper when I wasn't doing whatever I was actually supposed to be doing in class. The poems were always constructed from rhyming couplets. I don't think I had a precise rationale for that - I just took it for granted that that was how poems worked.

I remember a day in the third grade when a poet came to talk to our class. He told us that poems didn't always have to rhyme, and I remember being totally dumbfounded by that idea. He asked us to each write a short poem, and I wrote one about the man in the moon - in rhyming couplets, of course. After all these years, I can still remember that the first lines went something like this:

The man in the moon must be shy
Because as he passes by
All we see of him is his face
The rest is gone without a trace

Anyway, I didn't actually write this particular poem on the spot - it was something I had been working on already, and I wrote it down in class that day because I thought it was pretty hot stuff, and I wanted to impress the poet. So, the poet asks if anyone wants to volunteer to read their poem, and I suspect you all know whose little hand shot up. I read my poem about the man in the moon, and I remember that the poet said that it was very nice, but that he was worried that I hadn't understood what he'd meant when he said that poems didn't have to rhyme. (Which, to be fair, was mostly correct.) So he started to help me to revise the poem, to take the rhymes out. He suggested something more along the lines of:

The man in the moon must be shy
Because, as he passes
All we see of him is his face
The rest is gone

And I remember being totally at a loss as to how to react. I mean, it's not like I thought there was anything wrong with his version of the poem. I just didn't like it. After all, it didn't rhyme.

This past week, I was going through my stash of old writing notebooks, and I remembered that little anecdote for the first time in ages. I think it would be an incorrect over-simplification to say that I stopped writing poems because of the visit from the poet, but I certainly did kind of drift away from poetry for a long time. I didn't really pick it back up again until college, when I was belatedly trying to study creative writing, and the introductory course included both short fiction and poetry. My writing instructor was a prose author, and I don't think she really had many strong feelings about poetry beyond what she needed to in order to teach that half of the curriculum. I do remember that one thing she was emphatic about was that she didn't want us trying to rhyme, because that was less important than the other concepts we were supposed to be learning.

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

Anyway, most of the poems I wrote in that class were pretty awful. I had internalized the message by then that rhymes were bad news, and a lot of the stuff I wrote is just really overwrought. I read it now, and I can tell how desperately I was trying to make it sound deep, mainly because I didn't have much idea what I was doing, and I was clearly grasping for the sort of thing that it seemed like people wanted to hear. Deep feelings, deep meanings, weighty subjects. Bring out the death and the trauma, and don't skimp on the ennui. No more poems about the man in the moon, that's for sure. No more rhyming couplets.

Except for one. The one poem I liked when I re-read it this past week was, ironically, the "deepest" one I did, and also the only one to include a rhyming couplet. If anyone is interested, I've included it below.

In my notebook, I found the copy of the poem which the instructor had marked-up. She circled the second half of the second line of the rhyming couplet and noted: "Seems extra. Not needed?"

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

Maybe she was right. Who knows? I kind of like it the way it is.