In the Palm of Your Hand by Steve Kowit

When I was in the fourth grade I won a poetry contest. The prize was a quarter and the poem began something like this: Flutter flutter butterfly. I suspect it went on in this way and probably rhymed.

In high school I won a countywide poetry contest. I receive ten dollars and a copy of a book by a local poet. I remember the poem and it was very bad. I was also co-editor of the school literary magazine and as such got a lot of my own stuff in it.

In college I won some other contest and as an English major took lots of creative writing classes and even published a chapbook of my poems for a class.

Then I stopped writing poetry. And now I wonder why. Beyond the usual too busy, too this, too that, I think I considered poetry to be self-indulgent and maybe only for kids. I know better. I love Yeats and Elliot and Adrienne Rich. I know people make a lifetime of study of the art and craft of poetry, yet the kernel of that feeling remained, as if I should be embarrassed to be writing poetry, to be wasting my time.

About a year ago a friend of mine encouraged me to try poetry again. Low and behold, unlike my foray into novel writing, or my minor success at short story writing, here was something I was actually good at and enjoyed doing.

Not one to do something without studying the hell out of it, I started getting books from the public library. Steve Kowit's In the Palm of Your Hand proved to be one of my favorites. It is easy to understand, has fun exercises to get the juices flowing and covers a huge amount of material. It has made me a better poet, no question about it. So much so in fact that I just put my order in at Amazon for a copy of the book. I want to read it again and to have it available for reference. So, since one of my reading goals for the year was to read books that have been languishing on my home shelves, and since I just bought this book, does this count as a booked owned, or as a library book? I think I am counting it as a book owned.