Teen Angst
Throw Out Your Crappy High School Poetry Before You Die
It stinks worse than any teen spirit.
I am grateful to my fourth grade teacher, who told me I was a good writer. Because of her, I wrote constantly. At one point I was a reporter, a job I loved, but it paid squat. However, I also blame that teacher for leading me to believe in myself so much that I held onto every notebook of words I ever wrote in my formative years.
I surmised that upon my untimely death, my brilliance would be discovered when my diaries were plumbed, and my complete written works would be published. I fancied myself some 20th century Emily Dickinson sans the white garb and chosen social isolation. I’ve driven by her house, so obviously I thought I could be her. But I just rediscovered a bin of my written works, and they were horrific. There were hundreds and hundreds of pages of absolutely terrible rhyming lines that if they were actually couplets, they yearned to be consciously uncouplet-ed. I was pretentious enough to create a table of contents in some journals.
The notebooks had the names of my high school and college emblazoned upon them. My high school closed years ago, as an all-girl Catholic school with plummeting enrollment is prone to do, and my public college was rebranded and renamed. So my first…
