Bad Teenage Poetry
This site was inspired by two things.
- A desire to learn more about the web development framework NextJS
- Discovering an old digital archive of poetry from high school
Reading through the archive made me equal parts nostalgic (as I remembered things about the situations behind the poems) and mortified (by how truly awful the poems are). In the end, I was inspired to make this site which contains pages and pages of terrible teenage poetry.
Each poem has an intro describing as much of the circumstances behind it as I can remember along with annotations throughout the poems themselves.
Feast upon my shame and enjoy.
Writings
Fir Acres
Everyone has a collection of defining moments in from their past and they can trot out at least a couple of them without evening having to stop and think.
I have lots of what I like to call secondary defining moments (like the first breast I ever got to touch that was not in the context of nursing and belonged to a real girl).
But the really insane moments divide your life into two sections. Everything that happened before and everything that happened after.
I spent two weeks in the summer of 1993 at the Fir Acres Workshop Workshop in Writing and Thinking. There were about 20 of us. We lived in the dorms, we wrote every day, took writing classes. I wore skirts, painted my toenails black, climbed soda machines, read poems out loud in the Lewis & Clark Chapel and went delightfully insane in a way that I've never quite been able to replicate (though not for lack of trying).
Unfortunately, the box with my notebooks and printouts from this time has gone missing. All I have left is the single poem published in the little book they put together at the end of the workshop.