Rachael Ikins
Rachael Ikins at fourteen with her father when she published first poem
I owe it all to Oma and Mrs. Patton
By Rachael Ikins
I come from a family of artists. Visual artists not poets. I can only attribute my writing to my Oma’s daily habit of letter writing to her 7 siblings in Germany after her nap and possibly my dad’s dyslexia. He would ask me to read him adult level poems when I was little rather than read bed time stories to me.
I wrote my first poem at age 7, a silly thing for Halloween.
In eighth grade I enrolled in advanced English. We had a new teacher, Mrs. Patton. She was brusque and businesslike and treated us as if we were college students. Herself a poet and visual artist she decided to dig us deep into the world of poetry when that part of the curriculum rolled around. We made notebooks of found poetry, memorized poems for a performance in the library and finally gave a try writing our own.
I could feel sweat rolling down my back as I struggled with mine. Riding in the car with my mom I had seen a man and his mother outside their house. The scene struck me and I tried to capture it. Mrs. Patton leaned over my desk and said, “No doubt. You are a poet.”
The summer following, one day the phone rang. It was her husband calling to say that my poem had been published in journal called Encore Magazine in NM. I was 14. Alone that afternoon, after hanging up, I poured a tiny glass of wine and toasted the lake.
I didn’t go to college for English and received little support from family for poetry though I have done it all my life.
I followed Mrs. Patton’s advice none the less, and periodically submitted to journals. I had a second acceptance which was a sonnet to a journal in England.
I also won a haiku contest in UK as a teen. Through all the upheaval in my life I kept writing; while I had a breakdown in college, worked mind numbing jobs to pay for therapy, and finally at 27 went back to finish my bachelors degree at Syracuse University. When I met my husband he urged me to write full time.
Hard times and illnesses followed. I kept in touch with Mrs. Patton. I submitted and Phillip helped once he retired from surgery. Our first laptop was to catalogue my poetry. I ran afoul of someone who claimed to be a literary agent but was really a scammer. Every bad thing thing that can happen to someone who just wants to write happened to me. Stuff stranger than fiction. I never stopped wanting to make it as a writer.
After bankruptcy and losing our house, I joined my first ever writing group of any kind at age 52. I also entered a poetry contest hosted annually by the National League of American Pen Women which is the oldest organization for women writers, arts, musicians and choreographers in the country. I won first prize and honorable mention. I could not believe it. I ran screaming up the driveway to tell Phillip. We hugged each other in front of the sink and cried.
It became clear that poetry whether blessed by my parents or not was my life line. I woke one morning with a poem in my head. No paper in the motel so my mom handed me a napkin and a motel pen. The poem was comparing the mountain to an old wizard I think. That time she was thrilled.
To be fair to my mom, later in her life when she was in her eighties she used to carry my books in her purse and go to Book Club and take them with her out to lunch with friends. She sold quite a few for me. In Slideshow in the Woods is a poem titled “Book Club” which she also read out loud to the ladies.
Was about Thursday nights when my dad had Rotary Club and she and I ate frozen pizza or Mexican and both read at the table!!! A definite no-no when dad was home LOL
She just wanted me to have a secure income and knew as an artist herself that just poetry wasn’t going to be it.
My grandmother back when I started to write poems offered me her cherry writing desk built by my grandfather for when she died. I did inherit it —don’t have it any longer —but I remember us sitting together and Oma trying to talk me into journalism for that secure job to support the poetry
All the times I was so close to ending everything, all that I lost, until the only thing left was poetry.
I won more prizes through the Pen Women eventually became a member, and most of the winning poems appeared in Slideshow in the Woods, my first chapbook.
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My first reading in my 50s
Through the Canastota Writers I met Michael Czarnecki who was the publisher of Foothills Publishing which released my first chapbook ,“Slideshow in the Woods” in 2008. In 2010, Foothills published “Renovation”. I gave my first ever reading at Canastota Library where all the members of Canastota Writers group came. Founded Monday Night Poetry At Sushi Blues in Hamilton, NY. Feature and open mic, in this photograph.
2014 Finishing Line Press accepted my second chapbook “Transplanted.” Followed by “God Considered the Horizon” 2015 and “ Historias” 2016.
December of 2014 I went with Finishing Line after an invitation from publisher Leah Maines to a workshop through Abroad Writers Conference to Lismore, Ireland. We stayed in a castle. I studied novel with Jane Smiley, poetry with Patricia Smith and flash fiction with Ethel Rohan. Finishing Line authors introduced the teachers at evening readings. It was wonderful being the opening act for Patricia and overall one of my best memories. I am amazed I flew all by myself all that way.
2016 Log Cabin Books published my first prose collection, a group of fantasy stories connected by a common theme and characters. This book contains my artwork as illustrations.
2018 I met the women of Clare Songbirds Publishing House. From that meeting came my first full length poetry collection “Just Two Girls” which went on to win the 2018 Poetry book prize through Sacramento Poetry Center. I am now an associate editor and also work as a judge in their annual Elizabeth Royal Patton Poetry Competition. And yes, this is the same Mrs. Patton who said all those years ago when I was 14 “You are a poet.”
Here is that poem from Slideshow in the Woods and first published the summer of ’68 in Encore Magazine NM
9:30 p.m. Sunday
Wearing a T-shirt and dirty pants,
You were poised on your elbow
Sidelong in the driveway.
Smoking a dead cigarette,
You polished your car.
Your mother, a green
Hose in her hand, watered the lawn
Nearby and failed to notice
The spray touching you, her
Orange dress wrinkles from
Sitting at dinner so long.
I saw you in the driveway,
Your mother watering the lawn;
And I wanted to belong.
This is the first prize winning poem when I was 52
Winter Chorus
The ice-toads crept out today,
They live under blue curls of snowdrift
Sing a creaking, groaning song.
Their skin glass-
White and lavender,
Cold Crystal new-sky eyes.
Twenty below out and
The voice of the forest opens.
Those strange creatures
Clatter and clack
And breed between the ice-stars
That tiptoe over the pond
Like some giant stilted bird.
Autumn Evening with Cool Drizzle
An etheree
Woods.
Forest
Shrugs her shift
Off, her collar-
Bones exposed. Fields drop
Their quilted skirts. Thighs, knees,
Ankles. Earth steps out. All soft.
Turgid hardnesses slip. Pooling
Beside rimed brooks. Rusty, gold, dusty
Silver, purple—can’t tell the difference,
The colors of her dress any more.
Shadows paint everything gray.
Monochrome. Single bird
Chatters. Interrupts
Winter’s windy
Monotone.
Prelude.
Rain.
Cider Press Review 2010
The long ago UK prize winning haiku
Bicycle riders
Dangle moth-like
Against rain