Confessions of a Class Poet  -Larry Smith(from Faces and Voices: Tales)
Okay. What? My turn?Stand up? Okay. Here goes.Hello. My name is Edgar Allen. And, uh … I’m a class poet.I started the stuff back in junior high, scribbling into my notebook at nights alone in my room. I’d hide it in my underwear drawer back then. I’d lie to my parents, say I was doing math homework or writing a report, but I can admit it now—it was always poems, one after another—getting high on them alone in my room and hiding it in a drawer when I was through.
Then one night my freshman year of high school I was out with friends and we ended up at a coffeehouse…they were doing an Open-Mic poetry reading and at the their coaching, I got up and read my first poem out in public. I had been carrying it in my coat pocket for weeks. They egged me on, and the crowd ate it up. I was hooked—I was…a class poet—I can say it now—writing poems for friends, the school newspaper, and then the school’s literary magazine A Pocket Full of Dreams.Others heard about me and before long I was writing poems for them for their girlfriends, eventually writing the class poem, the class song. I was in above my head and couldn’t stop myself—I was addicted.
For a time in college, I gave it all up, became a math major, studied science, developed my left brain. But then I had too much time to myself, sat through long hours of boring lectures, a pen in my hand, paper there before me, and soon I was at it again—writing poems, going to poetry readings, reading single poems, then books by a single poet, finally I was doing whole anthologies. I had it bad. I began writing for the literary magazine A Cup of Poems.
For a long time I hid it from my folks, but then the English Department sent an issue of A Cup home to my parents. Soon I got the call. I couldn’t explain, told them I didn’t want to hurt anyone. The next weekend they did an intervention on me. My sister cried and begged me to continue my math major, said she knew a kid who was an English major and couldn’t get a job, was out on the streets and ended up awful—teaching sophomore English in a local high school. “Did I really want that? Did I know what it would do to our family?” Mom said, “We love you anyway, but please try to stop!” For the first time I saw my dad cry. I told them I loved them but I could handle the stuff, I was twenty-one, an adult, for god’s sake.
They’d gotten nowhere, and soon I was writing poems to a girl I found working in the library—she became my friend, and then my love. Turns out she was doing the stuff too—and our poems crossed at the circulation desk.We started an Open-Mic at the Coffee-Cup, and took over editing the lit magazine. We were two kids hooked and hooking others to writing poems. I’m not proud of any of this.We were spreading the word to all we met. Soon I was majoring in English and looking at a lifetime of words.
And then, well, Emily met Jack here and she started coming to your meetings—and so talked me into coming here tonight. I can tell you that I’ve already gotten rid of  my notebook and pens. Betsy checks my word processor for anything that has meter or even slightly rhymes. I’ve been clean for five days now—no verses, no stanzas, no lyric or narrative, no metaphors or puns, not even a prose poem. I know I’ll always be a poet, and I can’t promise that you all won’t end up in a poem tomorrow, but I’m trying, with Emily’s help, I’m taking it a day at a time.
Thanks to you all. It’s good to come clean, even if I had to do it with words.