On Identity
1998 Symposium, The Poetry Project

It would be difficult for me to talk about my identity as a writer without
acknowledging first my identity as a reader.  What I learned to do early
in life, as a survival mechanism of sorts, was to invent a self, or a composite
of selves, as if my own life was formed out of a distant memory of who all
the other versions of me had been throughout the history of my kind.  I
distinctly remember those early moments in which my creative identity
emerged-- driving to the Angola Public Library on Saturday afternoons with
my parents, where, upon arriving, my father would quietly leaf through the new
issue of National Geographic in search of photos of naked women, while I retreated
to that narrow shelf in the children's section, labelled "biographies." It was a place
I would return to over and over again during those years, and a place from which
eventually I would accrue the knowledge of the lives of an incongruous assortment
of baseball players, politicians, inventors and scientists, mostly white and mostly
male, with the rare exception of a Frederick Douglass or a Betsy Ross.  Having
decided at some early age that no one in my family or among my friends would
serve as an appropriate role model, I removed myself to the realm of books to
find out not only who I was to be, but perhaps more importantly, where I fit in.

The quest began for me at the age of ten, when I found a book titled simply
"Abe Lincoln."  I remember few particulars of that day, though I assume
that it was a typical Buffalo winter, and that I confused it in my
imagination with the winter of 1816 during which Lincoln's father made his
way across the Ohio River during a blizzard that killed 2000 pioneers.  For
some time after reading that text, I went through a series of identity
transformations, which began with my insistence that my mother buy me a
coonskin cap, which she never did, even when I spied one at the Erie County
Fair the next summer.  Not to be stifled in my search for the frontier, I
settled instead for a flannel shirt and a pair of cowboy boots, and began
to spend many an afternoon crossing the corn field behind my childhood
home, imagining that I, like Lincoln, did live in Indiana and that some day
I would leave my humble life there to become a storekeeper, postmaster,
surveyor, state assemblyperson, lawyer, and eventually the president of the
United States.

There was seldom a moment in my otherwise ill-adjusted childhood during
which I didn't think I was someone else.  By the age of 15, it still seemed
to me that no one would ever understand me as much as Abraham Lincoln.  I
had conversations with him in my head; I tried to read books about
surveying; and I composed polite speeches which I hoped someday to deliver
to my family before I left for the real world.  And then something
happened.  One day, while wandering aimlessly in the Kmart department store
on Route 5, I discovered an album by the Rolling Stones-- a record which
had arrived in my town at least a decade late.  It may have been as much a
shock to me as it was to my parents when I stopped thinking of myself as
Abraham Lincoln and decided that I was Keith Richards.  I gave up the
flannel and started wearing ripped tee-shirts.  I collected cigarette butts
out of my father's ashtrays and began posing in front of the mirror with
them dangling out of the corner of my mouth, and finally, after my parents
got tired of me running around the house playing air guitar with a bent
tennis racket, they bought me a used acoustic guitar at a garage sale.
From that point on I would never be the same.  Suddenly the idea of being
the president seemed frivolous to me.  I was going to be a rock and roll
star. For a little over two years I persevered mostly unsuccessfully to
master the fine art of the rock guitar riff, all along putting up with my
younger brother's relentless heckling.  And at the very moment that I was
ready to acknowledge defeat, I discovered a new entity to model myself
after-- a person who was in my mind, the genetic cross-breed of Abraham
Lincoln and Keith Richards.  His name was Bob Dylan, and his three chord
folk style guitar songs were those that any novice musician could at least
imitate badly.  I quickly retrieved my flannel shirts from the recesses of
my closet, and again, spent afternoons crossing the corn field behind the
house imagining that I was in Minnesota, and that some day I would rise up
from my humble beginnings to play my guitar in a cafe in a place called the
West Village, and that possibly someday I would even meet a poet named
Allen Ginsberg.  I spent months reading every available biography of Dylan,
and, as a teenager, I even learned how to make use of those more
sophisticated research tools-- the bound periodicals, the microfiche
machines, the photocopier, and the VCR.  I began to compile an archive from
with I could easily lift personality traits, noting any vague similarity
between Dylan's childhood and mine, taking account of each theory of his
psychological imbalances, following the important events in his life, and
of course, committing to memory the chronology of events that had led to
his fame.  It was around this time that I began wearing a harmonica holder
around my neck, even to the grocery store, and it was around this time that
I began to write poems.

While there have been many occasions during my life when I have been asked
to account for, explain, and even apologize for the various phases of my
sometimes  delusional, sometimes politically incorrect, and sometimes
vulgar identity metamorphoses, I have always believed that it has been just
such unruly behavior patterns that saved me from an otherwise dull life and
possibly an untimely demise in the semi-rural, semi-suburban hell of my
childhood.  There are few aspects of my identity not formed out of that
escape.  What I learned from those early heroes was what I had intuited
from childhood, that one's identity existed as one's invention, and that as
a creative person, one's identification and explanation of the self might
always be in flux, like the whole of the universe is in flux, existing as a
place of multiple possibilities, dependent only upon one's attentions to
the messages arriving from the outside.