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ON BECOMING A POET

Submitted by Thomas Penn Johnson

        In My junior year of high school I met Owen Dodson who spent a week as  a guest instructor in my daily dramatics class, and he was the guest judge at our spring drama festival in which our school’s Thespians competed. He did this also in my senior year. I followed him around like a puppy, inexplicably mesmerized by his presence and everything he said. Then in my freshman year of college I became fast friends with my freshman classmate Walter Martin Wangerin, Jr. who was already seriously writing poems and stories: I liked to read literature and he love to share his poetry with me–a sharing that has continued until today when I received five poems from him in the mail. Then in graduate school where I was studying English literature with the dream of becoming a great scholar of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama like my mentor Joseph A. Bryant, Jr. who was chairman of the English department. I took a course in British poetry and fiction under poet Robert Watson with whom I was fascinated much like I was with Owen Dodson, and then I was a graduate assistant to poet Gibbons Ruark who impressed me as a stern taskmaster and a disciplined writer. I also took a course in Literary Criticism under poet Allen Tate who took a liking to me on the first day of class and invited me to his office after class, something we did after every class during the semester. About halfway through the semester he was scheduled to do an evening of poetry reading at the university,and he was commiserating with me about his reluctance to read “Ode to the Confederate Dead” because, as he said, “I wrote that so long ago it seems somebody else wrote it.” I begged him to read it anyway because I had never heard him read it. He paused in thought for some time, then said to me perhaps the most influential words spoken to me in adulthood, he said: “Thomas, you should write poetry.” I was amazed, I had never even considered that possibility, so totally confounded I said to him plaintively, “But I wouldn’t have any idea where to start.” He said, “Then You should talk to my friend Ralph Waldo.” He picked up his office phone and called New York to speak to Ralph Ellison whom he told he had a young man who needed to write poetry but didnt know how to begin and he asked him to speak with me. Mister Ellison told me I should “write what you know.” A week later I wrote my first Poem about living with my mother who was in the last stages of alcohol addiction and who died of cirrhosis of the liver by the end of the year. (I have lost that poem–somewhere in my files, I hope.) I continued in graduate school on my journey to become a great literary scholar, and then in 1973 while living in Pelham, New York I saw the comet Kohoutek, the most spectacular celestial sight I have ever seen. [Kohoutek became visible several hours after the authorities had predicted and thus most everybody missed seeing this most beautiful and unforgettable phenomenon.] I was inspired to write my very first sonnet entitled “Kohoutek.” In the summer of 1975 I put aside the last chapter of the doctoral dissertation on Milton to see if I could spend a whole summer writing poetry. A flood of poems arrived and thereafter I put aside the dissertation and the dream of being a scholar, and I have never looked back. In 1992 I published my first volume of poems entitled If Rainbows Promised Not in Vain. Three more volumes completed and now waiting in the wings. [8-5-2019]
This essay was originally published in 'Poets' by Poets Choice.

THE DUDLEY THESPIANS

Submitted by Thomas Penn Johnson

        From September 1958 to May 1961, I attended James B. Dudley High School, and I was a member of The Dudley Thespians. The Thespians were those students who were enrolled in a dramatics class that met every day during the last period of the day; they studied plays and produced two plays a year–a full-length production in the Fall semester and in the Spring semester a one-act play at a regional festival of plays performed in the Dudley Auditorium. There were matinee performances attended by students from local junior high schools and evening performances attended by Dudley students and the general public. The 1000-seat Dudley auditorium was always packed for every play performed by The Dudley Thespians.
        The Dudley Thespians were instructed by, and under the direction of, English teacher Mrs. Barbara Wells. She had a comprehensive knowledge of theatrical arts, and she was a consummate master of dramaturgy. In directing her players, she demanded nothing less than perfection in their mastery of stagecraft. Watching her physical presence in rehearsals was like watching the physical manifestation of the essence of every character who spoke and moved on the stage.
       Before arriving at Dudley High School, I was inspired to join The Dudley Thespians by my attendance at the matinee performances. I saw the spectacular and unforgettable performances of the full-length play Bell, Book, and Candle and the one-act play The Lamb in the Window (in which my brother Jesse was privileged to perform). The plays themselves were powerful, and the phenomenal acting of the players like Franklin Cheek, Harold Hairston, and especially Shirley Hinnant seemed to me stunning and magical.
        To get accepted into The Dudley Thespians a new student had to audition in class before Mrs. Wells and the returning students during the first week of the Fall semester. A new student had to select a poem or speech and then perform alone on stage an interpretive reading of the selected piece. Anxious because another student had already chosen “Invictus,” the standard first choice of many, I spent hours in the school library frantically searching for a poem to recite. When I discovered in the library the volume entitled The Collected Poems A. E. Housman, I was profoundly moved by the poems, and I resolved to choose a poem written by Housman. Ironically, this sophomore already committed to study for the ministry was inexplicably drawn to the poem “The Laws of God, the Laws of Man.” As I became in later years, I think Mrs. Wells was astonished by this unique selection.
        During three years under the direction of Mrs. Wells, I was privileged to perform in the following plays: The Willow and I, Still Stands the House, Night of January 16th, High Window, Arsenic and Old Lace, and Everlasting Flowers (with which in 1961 The Dudley Thespians won best play and I won best actor at the State drama festival held at Shaw University).
        Under the tutelage of Mrs. Wells, I was privileged to enjoy the instruction of guest directors/judges poet Owen Dodson of Howard University and Dr. Eady of Bennett College.
In college I enjoyed the direction of outstanding dramatics teachers Dr. Paul Harms of Concordia Senior College and Miss Anna Krause of Northwestern University—truly great teachers (I had the lead roles in A Man for All Seasons & Murder in the Cathedral, and I played the role of Mephistopheles in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus). But the most significant teacher in my learning of dramatics was Barbara Wells, who in person and work represented superior excellence that defined The Dudley Thespians, to which I owe everlasting gratitude for making me the poet and artist that I have become.

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John Doe

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