Back to the Beginning

 

Sharon Waller Knutson

Sharon in red sweater with fans who bought all of her books after readings in the local cafe

I did it Backwards

By Sharon Waller Knutson

My English teacher said I would be a famous poet like Emily Dickinson and my mother said I won a national poetry contest with a poem, Elvis’s Pink Cadillac as a teenager. I have no memories or copies of my childhood writings which burned up in a shed fire. I abandoned poetry for fiction and then journalism.

When I was sixty-four, I published my first chapbook before I ever published a poem in a journal.

On New Year’s Day 2005 when I was 63, I started writing poetry and I wrote a poem a day for 100 days.  My goal was to write poems that anyone could understand from children to senior citizens. So I sent a different poem to five friends with different backgrounds to see what they thought.

One was a woman I met on an online discussion about a TV show. She had raved about my writing. She was a mother of an eight-year-old boy who was learning poetry in class. He told his mother that he loved the poem and that I was writing just like his teacher taught him. A high school and college friend who taught poetry and journalism in high school said I was doing exactly what she taught her students. I sent my only rhyming poem to a mother of two whose boyfriend wrote rhyming poems. She loved it. A friend said I painted word pictures. My grandchildren loved my poems and wanted copies.

I was told by poets that to get published I had to send poems to literary contests, so I tried a few and got a loud NO. Too childish or Sounds like a newspaper story.

So I decided I wasn’t going to waste my time with journals and instead I was going to publish a chapbook. Again, I was told by poets the only way I could publish a poetry book was to win a contest. I had been told I couldn’t do this or that all my life and so I ignored the naysayers and did it anyway.

Somewhere I read when looking for a publisher find a publisher of a poet who writes what you’re writing and contact them. I admired the poetry of Shoshauna Shy, so I looked up her first publisher, Moon Journal Press and emailed the editor Mary M. Ber, who was a poetry professor in Wisconsin and she told me to send her 30 poems by mail. Then she called me and said she would publish 24 of the poems in a chapbook.  I was so stunned I was speechless.  

She noticed I was quiet and asked me if I was upset because she suggested a couple of commas. I told her I thought she was going to tell me: “This is crap” and teach me how to write poetry. She laughed. “You know how to craft poetry. I look for imagery and you gave me that.” Mary told me I was the first feminist poet whose chapbook Moon Journal Press published. “Sharon Olds would be proud,” Mary said.

My chapbook, Dancing with a Scorpion, was printed on an old-fashioned press, stapled and delivered to me March 27, 2006 on my 64^t birthday. I got two free copies and bought 20 copies at $3 each, a $2 discount from the $5 price tag on the back of the book. I sold all but one.

Shortly after my book was published, Mary retired and moved to Tucson, 100 miles from where I lived but we never met. Moon Journal Press shut down a few years later and my book is out of print.

Literary Mama was the first journal to publish my poems. I believe the Poetry Editor was Rachel and she published, His Mother, in August 2006 and Family Reunion in 2007. In 2011, I read Orange Room Review and knew that was my market. Editor Corey D. Cook was looking for “accessible poetry with substance” so I sent him three poems and he published Perfect Son and Transplant, becoming the second journal to publish my poetry. Literary Mama is still publishing poetry, but Corey closed Orange Room Review in 2014 and opened Red Eft Review which has also published many of my poems.

I was pleased when Sandy Benitez, editor of Flutter Press published My Grandmother Smokes Chesterfields in a bound book in 2014. While Mary decided the order of the poems, this time it was digital printing and up to me to set up the book the way I wanted it printed. Sandy was patient and accepted revisions up to the publication date which she said helped her because she didn’t have to do any editing. She remembered me to a friend as “easy to work with.” I say the same thing about her. I bought 100 books and sold them in the local café. I have one copy left. Flutter Press has since closed and my books are out of print.

In 2017, I discovered Your Daily Poem published poems for children to senior citizens who might not read traditional poetry and was looking for funny uplifting poems, which was right up my alley. Editor Jayne Jaudon Ferrer and I hit it off right away and she published 27 of my poems from 2017 to 2024. Most of the poems except were written between 2005 and 2010. Although Jayne stopped taking new submissions in 2024, you can still read a poem a day on her site.

When  my poem, “Romeo,” about my neighbor and her Peacock was published on Your Daily poem, my neighbor passed me on the dirt road and said she got phone calls all morning from friends in Canada who said they read my poem and said “that sounds like you” and she told them. “That is me. I know the poet.” She was excited and happy. “You are a rock star,” she said. Neither my neighbor nor her friends are poets.  I knew then I had achieved the goal I set out to reach: Make people happy and make poetry accessible to everyone all over the world. Read Romeo: https://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=2748

More publishers who publish my type of poetry have popped up since then and to date I have published a total of 13 books and  1,000 poems in numerous journals.

Some of my first poems published:

Woman of the Superstitions

Through binoculars we watch her,

sun bleached hair covering

her shoulders like a shawl.

 

Skin the color of the sand

beneath her feet.

 

Eyes sometimes as blue

as the Superstitions

or green as the Palo Verde.

 

Sometimes dark as the eyes

of the Apache whose footsteps

she carefully traces.

 

She climbs to the top

of the Superstition Mountains

painted pink in the sunset.

 

Follows a pack of coyotes

down the trail past Ponderosa Pine

and giant Saguaros.

 

Sleeps soundly in the sand

as a rattlesnake slithers

across her hard belly.

 

Eats the fruit

of the prickly pear, juice

dribbling down her chin.

 

Takes a drink from the sky.

And a shower under a rainbow.

 

Some say she is a lost

hiker who doesn’t want

to be found.

 

Others say she is a ghost

of an Indian maiden

or a miner’s daughter.

 

You say she is a mirage

of thirsty imaginations

and lonely hearts.

 

I say she is a reflection

of the woman I want to be.

 

From Dancing with a Scorpion

 

Perfect Son

The summer I turn eight
my grandmother tells me
how she dressed my father
and his sister like dolls,
how still they sat balancing
tea cups on their knees
at her ladies auxiliary parties.
 
She shows me his report cards,
A's lined up like Christmas trees,
the drawer filled with Boy Scout badges,
his teachers certificate in a silver frame,
next to a picture of my father in cap and gown
his dark eyes shining with promise.
 
She never talks about the days
she sat on the porch step,
empty cash box in her hand,
waiting for his return, while
my father swigging whiskey,
toured the country
in the back of a box car.
 
She never mentions the nights
she eagerly jumped out of bed
to take his collect calls, just to hear
his voice, the hours she spent
drawing the thousands of dollars
from her account, wiring the money
for bus tickets never purchased.
 
My father surprises us with a visit,
face flushed, grinning too much,
my grandmother giddily hugs him,
bustles off to make tea, leaving me
standing stiffly, smelling his whiskey
breath as he folds me in his arms.


Transplant

 

On a busy street,
a mangled bicycle spoke,
a child's pink Nike shoe,
a heart pumping inside
a brain dead body as warm
as supper waiting on the stove.
 
Across town in a duplex,
an oxygen tube,
a ticking clock,
a young heart failing
like the worn out pump
in the old Dodge.
 
In the community hospital,
an operating table,
scrubs and rubber gloves,
a sharpened scalpel,
a surgeon's heart racing
as fast as a marathon runner.

 

Life

The sky is gray,
the ground bare
and the air as still
as my mother
when they lower
her into the ground.
 
Three days later,
the sun sparkles,
grass sprouts,
a soft breeze blows
as my grandson
emerges from the womb.

 

 

Déjà vu

As soon as the La-Z-Boy
delivery men leave,
my husband,
in oil stained pants,
ball point pen protruding
 
from his shirt pocket,
Pepsi can in hand,
walks toward the recliner,
blooming like a red rose
on the green carpet.
 
Before he can plop down,
I whip out the rainbow
colored crocheted blanket
my mother draped over
her easy chair to cover
the cat claw marks.
 
Flash back to a memory
of my grandfather
napping on the couch
my grandmother has kept
wrapped in plastic for forty years,
 
and me at ten repeating over and over,
I will never be like her.

 

Caregiver

She hears

her seventy year old bones

crunch on the concrete, 

 

feels the pain erupt

and cover her

with red hot lava, 

 

and wonders who

will cook his meals

and do the dishes and laundry. 

 

Now up to her elbow

and knee deep in plaster,

she stares at his silver head,

 

leaning over her as the aroma 

of chicken soup and Tide

fill the air like her favorite perfume. 

 

All were first published in Orange Room Review