Someone said to me the other day, “Man, you’re prolific! Where are all of these books coming from?”
The answer is, I’m not prolific. I like the idea of being a prolific poet, but since being home in Minnesota the past month, I realised that I’ve been writing since I was six. I wrote my first poem in the 1st grade, which my parents saved, and the other day I dug out of the attic, hidden beneath a box of dust-covered soccer trophies and kits.
“Why Did God Invent Insects”: the title of the first ever on record.
Why did God invent the bee that stings?
And the mosquito that sucks your blood?
Why did God invent the ant that gets stuck in your honey?
And why in the world did God invent the ladybug,
That doesn’t seem to do very much?
Why in the world did God invent bugs?
I guess I’ve always loved writing. This way of expression that I seem to know best—not that I know best, of course—but it’s become my way of interpreting the world: paying attention. I also know now why God invented bugs, for fly anglers, duh!
I’ve been writing things down for as long as I can remember. Even as an eleven-year-old kid, I kept a journal and pen in my fly-fishing vest, which still sits on my childhood fly-tying desk. My favourite classes in high school were English Lit (Mr Arneson’s, to be specific), so it’s no wonder I took up the subject in college. I learned to write there. The first grade I received on a paper was a C-, written bold in red. That ate me up, and I painfully rewrote it over and over again, only to receive a B. Mr Voracek was his name. My university professors were always hard to please. I hated and idolised them at the same time, a bit like my football (soccer) coaches. Jason Goldsmith was the best professor I ever had, and then there was Dan Barden, whom I also adored, who taught us that there were “no rules to this writing thing,” and that the best thing we could all do was write for 30 minutes every day, even if we never intended to be writers. And then there was Carol Reeves, who taught me to write less, more concisely, and better. I cannot thank you all enough.
So it’s no wonder that, to this day, I’m mistaken as prolific. I’ve written thousands and thousands of pieces over the past 30 years, and I’ve been privileged that some people, like Steve Duda at The Fly Fish Journal (now Patagonia Fish Tales), showed interest despite my youthful exuberance. The first piece I ever submitted was titled Brad Pitt, I Love You: A Tribute to Hollywood’s Sexiest Fly Fisherman. That piece was bad, but The Duda showed an editor’s patience and kindness as he chopped it up every which way possible.
I’ve finally built up the courage to release my poems into the wild, which have turned into books (which would mean the world to me if you bought). I’m not saying that they are any good, but sometimes someone likes them. And while I often claim to only write for myself, life is indeed a bit sweeter when someone writes me a note like Richard:
“Ben, I know this poem from your book in its expanded version. I can almost recite it by heart. As I am getting on in years, I have selected A Love Letter to the River to be read out loud at my life’s celebration. I could almost live in those words. Thank you for your poetry. It is balm to the soul for an ageing angler.”
In this way, it is nice for those thousands of hours spent typing in the dark to be validated.
I wake up every day now at 5:00 a.m. and write until my kid, Rip, wakes up. It is nearly the only discipline I have. Work for most, but play for me. This is what I do. In a way, it’s who I’ve become: a football coach who writes poems, and sometimes reads them aloud to his team and the players he loves. As always, I’ll leave you with a poem I wrote when I was thirty years old, but could have most definitely been written by a kindergartner.
Do One Thing
I read somewhere
the other day:
You can do anything,
but you can’t do everything.
I think what
the author meant was:
Bees buzz.
Grouse drum.
Hummingbirds hum.
Dogs love.
And the Great
River runs.