@ Professor Karen Fish

One time when I was a freshman in college, I accompanied one of my friends into his friend’s bedroom, where they were having a kind of drunken/high conversation about philosophy. I think they were discussing the concept of reincarnation, but all I did was listen. 

I later that night wrote a poem about their conversation, the kind of piece that felt a little pretentious as I was writing, but I was into that kind of thing then, so I kept writing. Later, after pregaming to go out, I presented the poem on the screen of my phone to him, and after reading it, he hugged me so hard he lifted me up off the ground. I wasn’t entirely used to being praised for my writing, at least, not that visibly. 

The next semester, I entered into a poetry class, where I was the only freshman in a room full of seniors, and I felt insignificant, but also like one of the best writers in the room. It was one of my most productive writing phases, though I was exclusively writing poetry. My professor at the time, Professor Fish, had wild and slightly frizzy hair, and sometimes she would chew on the end of a pencil, or write words or phrases on the blackboard with which we were supposed to use to formulate poems for the next week. These phrases could be anything from "Giotto" to "wild elsewhere" to "swipe out" when she heard one of my classmates talk about swiping out of a dorm building and clapped her hands audibly for the poetic nature of the phrase. She always carried a huge stack of papers which she immediately handed out and rarely asked us about again. She consistently complained about parking on Loyola's campus, though most days she walked from her house to the campus.

Most importantly, Professor Fish liked me, in a way that my shaky narcissism at the time really needed. One time she pointed out that she hated the line of one of the poems I wrote, and I took her words to heart immediately, deleting the line from the poem and hating it just as much as she claimed to. She was always supportive of my poems, but more especially, she appreciated my poetry for what it was--unique to me. In my freshman year, when I started dating a boy in March and broke up with my friends in April, I needed the reminders to let my creativity fly out of me until it had found a home elsewhere.

One thing I never understood about Professor Fish until later was why she didn't like the poetry of one of my other classmates, a senior named Peter, as much as she seemed to like mine. His poems were just as creative, they were frenetic and random and puzzling in a way that made you wish you had thought of them yourself. I was attracted to him in the way I can be attracted to people who play instruments like the saxophone--it's new and it's different and I most certainly don't see people like that every day. One day, Peter walked into the classroom--we all sat around one big conference table--and he set down his books, and a small vase full of water. The water was a little milky, and clearly in a receptacle for plants, but he proceeded to take a drink out of it anyway. I couldn't ever tell whether he was joking, or whether he was on cocaine, or whether his eyes were looking at me or straight through me into a future only he could imagine. He was one of the most interesting people I've ever met; he made me realize how attractive something ridiculous like the idea of quitting school to work in a butchery in Cincinnati for a semester could be. Fish didn't like him because he stole attention in the way a tiny flame steals oxygen--a little at a time until it's eventually touched every molecule in the room. One time he told me between breaths on a cigarette that he thought I had a distinct writing voice. I would have cried, had I not been so comfortable appearing indifferent.

Anyway, a lot had gone into my freshman year to make me confident about my poetry. I abandoned poems for a while after my freshman year, which was certainly a shame. It's hard to start noticing things and describing them in self-serving sentences, especially ones that can live independently as lines in a poem.