The Henley High Poetry Club Page 4

  “See you later, Car? After school to walk home?” I asked.

  She looked at me with a deadpan expression on her face. “No, that’s okay, thanks. I’d prefer to do my own thing today.”

  I felt my face grow red and hot but hoped that it would quickly subside. I wasn’t sure what was going on with Carmelita and me. Nothing, I guessed.

  She was gone down the stairs just like that. I looked at Tyler.

  “You know where I have to be after school, Ziv. Napoleon’s. Tonight I’ve got to totally reorganize the Blues section of the store. Do you know how long that’s going to take me?”

  We climbed the stairs to the second floor and walked down the hall toward the Trig room.

  “Uber-long, Ziv. I might be there past midnight.”

  We plunked ourselves down in last-row desks as Mr. Kim, our teacher, began writing the daily prompt on the board. I momentarily regretted spending so much time on Ms. Reese’s essay last night, when I should have been studying Trig. I had done the homework hastily during breakfast yesterday morning while Mom and Dad tried to book plane tickets to conferences that they had to attend next month in Philadelphia and Baltimore, respectively.

  I took a deep breath, reminding myself that my career as a literary artist trumped any other sort of assignment that could ever arise for me. I chose to calm down. I would get by in Trig; I studied enough and had received As and a few Bs thus far.

  As Mr. Kim finished writing out the prompt I considered potential subjects for my audition poem, the one that I would write later, after school.

  It was six fifteen that night when I threw another balled-up piece of paper over my shoulder. It was the fourth piece of trash—and the fourth aborted writing attempt of mine thus far—and I had been working for over an hour in the common area of our apartment building. The area was on the roof and offered pretty cool views of San Francisco Bay, the main city, and Berkeley. I sipped the cup of chamomile tea that I had brought up with me. The label on the box in my kitchen assured the user that it would “relax and soothe,” both of which I would accept for my audition poem-writing process.

  I wanted to keep the tone of my poem as true to myself as possible. I wanted it to be tough and gruff and wise and humorous. I knew that it wouldn’t rhyme; I didn’t want it to.

  Settling on a subject to write about was difficult. I went back and forth between stuff about the beauty and harmony of Muir Woods, and my escapade with Mara in freshman year. And Wren. I wanted to write about her most of all, but I also knew that she would be reading it and hesitated to try to articulate how I truly felt about her.

  I finished the tea and stood up from the wooden bench to stretch my legs. The lights on the Golden Gate glimmered. I felt inspired, as I always did from living here. But inspired to do what, exactly? What would I write?

  Just then I heard the roof door open and turned to see who had come in. Ramon and Amelia appeared with books in hand.

  “Hey, Hunter,” Ramon said. “How’s it going?”

  “Okay, I guess. Trying to write. How about you guys?”

  “Trying to study,” Amelia answered. They sat across from me and opened up their textbooks.

  “What are you writing?” Ramon asked.

  “A poem—but not the usual poem. Not flowery or anything. Like a Beat poem, a prose-ish sort of thing.”

  Amelia smiled. “Nice. For a girl?”

  I looked away into the distance. “I don’t know, maybe. It’s for a club at school. There’re auditions for it on Thursday and I have to bring in a poem of mine.”

  “Well, I’m not big into poetry or anything,” Ramon said as he put his arm around Amelia, “but when I have to write, I try to think of a phrase or line that I like first and go from there, instead of thinking about the content too much. I like to go with what I’m feeling, you know?”

  Suddenly I knew what I would write. I needed to get to a place of solitude, and fast. I grabbed my scattered pages and tea and went for the stairs.

  “Hey, where are you—” Ramon started to ask.

  “Thanks so much for all the help, Ramon. I’ve got to go.”

  “Good night,” Amelia called as I hurried down the steps.

  I didn’t stop to respond.

  On the first day of the poetry club, Caffe Trieste’s interior was dimly lit, even for an afternoon when the sun was still up. Tawny and cherry-colored wooden walls were covered with rows of black-and- white photos much like Ms. Reese’s. The smell of espresso beans radiated throughout the room.

  Fewer students had turned up for this first meeting than I had imagined would. About seven or eight of us were scattered throughout the place, listening to Wren speak in the center of the room. Will was by her side, nodding at everything that she said. Will was one of the music students with whom Wren always hung out.

  I couldn’t imagine that he was much of a writer. I remembered him from sophomore year when he had tried to organize a student protest against price increases on Henley High’s vending machines. For two weeks he’d spent every morning outside the front entrance screaming from atop a milk crate and handing out flyers on student rights to passersby. Will was a bit over the top for my taste.

  Some 1950s jazz played softly over the stereo system. There seemed to be a couple of non-Henley High folks at the countertop area—vaguely disgruntled-looking old men sipping cappuccinos and reading newspapers intensely. I thought of the Beats hanging out here years ago, all of their innovative ideas coming together, soon to change the philosophy of literature, of the world. I wanted to do that myself, with Wren, here, now. The possibilities seemed endless.

  Carmelita and Tyler took seats with Kate Shankar and her boyfriend. Car had been silent during the entire BART ride while Tyler riffed on Beatles records. Apparently he had gotten into an argument with Napoleon about which album of theirs was the best one. Knowing Tyler as I did, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the whole thing went on and on as a philosophical conundrum for weeks.

  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

  match me make me want

  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 . . . ”