Before Poetry

Before Poetry Joy Moore (bio) I In the time preceding poetry A friend of mine says that eleven is the best possible age, eleven teetering toward twelve, un-self-conscious and easily animated by imagination and particular delights. That pre-teen need to fit in still slinking around the edges. I remember self-consciousness awakening in me at that age, but if I think of being eleven, what inevitably arises first, still holding sway in me, is the church bells of the Episcopal school I attended in fifth and sixth grades. The bells rang before weekly chapel, a service unfamiliar to me, Baptist child that I was, and their sound comforted me, ringing out across the courtyard where I moved awkwardly, inarticulate in middle-school insecurities. They made music of the sky for a few minutes and sang of something else beyond the fenced-in world in which I moved each day. What I remember more viscerally than their ringing is the time I was assigned to set them going: another student and I are standing in a tiny room opposite the altar, the massive rope suspended from a bell so high its brass blends into the tower's shadows. I take a turn pulling on the rope with all my eleven-year-old might, my body briefly lifting off the floor. In the momentum, in that singular glory, I pull again and again, and the bell gains its swing and sings. From those years, it isn't an index of learning but a collage of things that return to me: beakers from a science fair project, the monkey bars on my first and very lonely day at that school or how I later sat with other girls in the bathroom, giggling over stolen notes. Not who liked whom, but the tornado gray tile, the stormcloud wall of the locked stall. And especially those church bells, still ringing somewhere inside me, down the arcades of my ribs and limbs. Though I lacked reflection for this then, what I was learning was inextricably bound to being-in-the-world, my whole self encountering in the sensible world, in things themselves, the visible and invisible, audible and silent, overt and intuitively sensed. Much of this learning was subterranean and not at all the world that I was being taught to inhabit. We sat still in desks and were taught things that did somehow accumulate into working knowledge of the world. In chapel, we sat [End Page 316] in pews and listened to the priest, just as I sat each Sunday listening to my father preach. Some of it stuck. The stories themselves, for one: Joseph in a dungeon interpreting a baker's and cup-bearer's dreams, for instance. The details surrounding me, too, like the blue-cushioned pews, the pearl-beaded purse of the woman who gave me a peppermint each week, the brass offering plate with its red velvet center, and a giant wall map in my Sunday school classroom. Imagine the stories we could tell through the catalogue of things that accumulate in early memories. But for so long, my sense of this was hidden in forests of intuition, and in the daylight of days, I was taught reverence for reason, formulas, ideas, and clear codes of conduct. These offered safe and acceptable pathways in which I eagerly walked, and yet my eyes kept alighting on horizons, drawn to their haunting elsewheres. Very real horizons, I might add: we lived in the country for several years, and we had a massive field behind our house, bordered on three sides by a line of trees. I was enamored of it, of what I sensed hinting through, hovering beyond. I daydreamed myself riding a horse straight through those high archways of bark, and into what great distance? I suspect the same that called to me when I later stood looking across an ocean expanse, or toward a mountain range, or off the back of a ferry. Out there, beyond me, and also, of course, into that frightening and fascinating interior vastness. Less than a decade after those bells, I remember sitting in an English classroom in Kimpel Hall and reading the...