When I was in college I had a summer job on the paint crew with a supervisor named “Groundhog” and two older men, one named “Regis” and the other we called “Cookie” (I never found out why).  Groundhog was content to drag out certain jobs all summer, and Regis was a millworker from Pittsburgh, content with going at a steady, if not slow, pace in his advancing years; but Cook was a farmer and he liked to get things done.  well that’s another story, but as it was, one summer I was with the crew that was working in the library. I guess we were painting the whole thing; the inside.  it was a hundred degrees outside and sixty inside, so going in and out was kind of painful.  often, Reeg told us to get lost; take a break, a long long break while we were in the library.  Just stay out of sight.  some slept, but I went to the third floor and indulged in the rows of stacks of books.  Sometimes it was books of art (I remember a painting of a foghorn that looked like the sound of a foghorn), and othertimes poetry and stories, but mostly poetry back then.  I learned to pull out the poetry books slowly, blowing the dark dust from the top of each one as I pulled it from the shelves, slathering myself in Carl Sandburg, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and gorging on Silvia Plath and others; I read widely on the third floor during those “breaks.”  Occasionally, I’d just wallow in the peacefulness and quiet of the place, and enjoy the smell of the books, as I had done when I was little and read books from the town library.  I don’t know if it’s the paper or the ink, but the smell of books, especially the binding, was an enchanting perfume from early on.  I am not sure we ever got the library done to everyone’s satisfaction; and I have know in my gut that there are some mystifying poem and paintings I missed somewhere in those long, tall stacks.  I should go back sometime.

I wrote poetry from when I was very young.  My mom never corrected my spelling, and I think my dad gave me a copy of the Slippery Rock University literary journal, Ginger Hill, and that gave me encouragement.  Like many artists, I wanted to be good at an art I didn’t do well; like painting; so some poems became like paintings, and I noticed that when I read, the words above and below and around a word “colored” it’s meaning for me; added nuances.  I was attracted to concrete poetry, but still felt the words needed to be horizontal to read them mindfully; but so many poems had words and phrases that glowed from the pages.  At Penn State I began to appreciate meter and poetic forms, as well as the line-cuts of free verse; Baliban and Weigl were my teachers, you can blame them partially for what I write; but their classes and the interaction with the other students gave me more encouragement.  I learned to hear poems and not just read them.  I remember an especially strong poem spoken by a thin woman who needed a drag on a cigarette and a shared chuckle from the crowd to calm her nerves enough to speak, and I was blown away by a sadness and strength expressed in her poems from somewhere in her life that needed to resound in the ears of other people.

I often was lead to a poem by an experience, an image, not knowing exactly what it meant or caring; but that it needed to be written, it needed rescued from the churning years.  The meaning was often just an appreciation or a joy; a peacefulness, or some other event that needed to resonate from the page.  Sometimes, it was a deep sadness that I had not brought to the surface; or a deep fear.  I learned, painfully, that if I didn’t at least get that image, or line of words down, it would be forgotten; so writing on a scrap of paper, pinned to the steering wheel with my thumb became a dangerous practice.  Eventually, I learned to pull over.   If it caught my attention, I decided there was some importance to it; though I didn’t always know what that importance was precisely.  I still have poems that I think are going to be great, but they are not very good yet; they need to have their significance teased out of them with some late nights of pondering and writing; avoiding the urge to force meanings and rhymes where they don’t really belong, even if they sound nice.   Something of me goes into the process of teasing it out, I know, but there is also something not from me there as well.  it’s strange.

Creative work often starts with pens, pencils, typewriters (long ago), keyboards and a computer and printer, none of which I know how to make myself, so I am indebted to the people who make those.  I have been given encouragement by family, friends and teachers, and by libraries of poetry books.  One of my high school English teachers, Joe Skibinski, taught a great creative writing class (where I first read Jarrell’s Death of a Ball Turret Gunner,” and Ferlinghetti’s “See it was like this when”) and introduced me to other memorable poetry writing and activities that included putting together our own volume of poems.  John Balaban called something I wrote about a bird outside my window, a “poem,” in his poetry writing class at Penn State, and I still remember that moment, and walking back to my shoebox-sized dorm room afterwards, thinking, wow, I must be a poet now!  He got me hooked on Roethke.  I gained confidence in writing free verse, while also learning to better appreciate poetic forms in Bruce Weigl’s poetry class, also at Penn State.  The collective poetry critique sessions with him and the other students were thrilling, sometimes tense, and vital.  I have taken far too many courses at the college level and beyond, but very few opened my eyes to the personalities and experiences of other people like those poetry classes.  Decades later, I still remember many of those poets and their poems.  I think I have written photocopies of their poems in some of my many notesbooks and boxes that have followed through a dozen moves, criss-crossing our country.  My editor/critic and friend, Jeannie Podralski, has suffered through my bad poetry for many years, probably since 1988 when I came back home from college to see a former High School English teacher, who spontaneously invited me to grade some poems for her (which I did thinking it was some honor and not just her unloading grading on a starry-eyed, college kid), and after reading many, I wrote to one of her students, Jeannie, after being so impressed with her poems.  That led to years of poetry and stories exchanged, often with years of silence and then bursts of more exchanges.   

When I was younger, my sisters and I played all kinds of games with the neighbor kids behind our house and down the street, in trees and down the steep sides beyond the end of a nearby road, and running around between the backyards of many people in our neighborhood.  Obscure versions of “Kick the Can,” the rules of which always seemed somewhere beyond the top of a shelf I could not reach.  The older kids knew…maybe.  On some of the hottest days, we would retreat to our basement; that was our version of air conditioning, and we spent long hours down there listening to records and cassettes and often playing board games and card games.  I started making my own version of Monopoly down there; I’m not sure why.  Later in life, I would dabble in making games, but once I did a workshop in Academic Games at Smith College, led by Mark Carnes from the Reacting to the Past group, it awakened that urge to do my own game.  That eventually resulted in the academic game, The Struggle for Civil Rights, which I co-authored with Harold McDougall.  I’d intended to write more academic games, and worked on some beginning ideas with a colleague at Northern Michigan University, but life intervened and that project never came to be.  But later still, I began to work on another academic game, and part way through, I decided I needed more “game-like” elements, since academic games are partly gaming and partly, maybe mostly, getting students to take on character roles that require them to learn and express quite a bit of course content.  I decided to take a break and work on a board game based on Gandhi’s campaigns of nonviolence against British rule in India.  I still haven’t gotten back to that particular academic game.  

The more I worked on that game, which eventually became Swaraj, the more I wanted to work on games.  I had written academically about katharsis and tragic drama, but saw that in a well done game there are moments when you realize you’ve made a terrible mistake that you couldn’t have predicted before, and now your efforts lie in ruin before you.  And yet, you keep playing.  Most people lose, in the end, when they play a game, and yet, we keep doing it.  Part of it is the thrill of winning, but I think it’s also the experience of struggling together with others, watching moments of excellence wrestle with unfortunate dice rolls or card draws.  And it’s always fun to throw mock insults around at the winner, or at a player who has just made a legitimate move, in two seconds, that blocks something you’d been planning for the last thirty minutes.

Jim Highland