Poetry Brings Me Back ... Home

We have a new Atticus on Air up this week! In it, Boo interviews Marcia Lebeau, whose poem we published last month. I encourage you to check it out. It's a candid and real conversation in which Marcia talks about: 

1. her writing process and how she sometimes needs to make a longer poem shorter
2. writing from prompts and historical places or events
3. how energy work is similar to a writing practice
4. on finding surprises in your writing and how that's where the good stuff is

I love Marcia's poem, A Misplaced Tropical Pond Leads to a Feminist Daydream. I really connect with the underlying sense of "place" and "home," what that land around White Lake in New Jersey might've meant for Johann Vass and his four wives. 

Home has been something I've been thinking a lot about for the last few years. It's what has been bringing me to the blank page, when I manage to come to it at all. And Marcia's poem brought to mind my home in New Jersey, a state I lived in longer than anywhere else I've lived as an adult. Before I lived there, though, it was a place I never thought I would live, much less feel a fondness for.

Telling people where I am from has become a more-complicated question to answer the older I’ve gotten. When I'm asked it now, New Jersey comes to mind as one of the first responses. I grew a lot in that place. Became the person I am now while living there. Wrote my first and, thus far, only collection of essays there. A part of me will always identify with that place, will be inextricably linked to it.

But before New Jersey, I lived in Washington DC. I also was born and spent the first four years of my life there. I feel a keen sense of “home” there, too. When I lived in New Jersey, I used to tell my friend Jenna that I was coming "home" when I visited her in downtown DC, and I meant it. I owned an apartment there near the convention center for nearly 20 years. I knew the fastest routes to different parts of town, which streets would have the best timed lights. I didn’t use Google maps or any other GPS. In many ways, DC might be the best answer to the question of where I “am from.”

And yet, I have trouble giving that as my "hometown" because from the age of five through high school I lived in Texas, mostly in Houston. I say "mostly" because, while my mom lived in Houston — and that is where I went to grade school and made the kind of friends that live in your heart forever, and played sports, and had my first kiss — I would fly to Dallas every other weekend to see my dad. So I also sort of lived there as a kid. Then I lived there again after college and met the woman who would be my spouse for 20 years. And so even though I "grew up" in Houston, Dallas is the Texas city that actually feels a little more like "home" to me. But they both are places that make up who I am.

After my divorce I moved to Philadelphia. I only spent about 4 years there, but those four years included the time around the pandemic. And so I became intimately close to that city in a way I could never be with any other city in one lifetime. A part of me is still there on 2nd and George in Northern Liberties, and will forever remain there. That apartment was only a few blocks from where Edgar Allan Poe lived when he resided in Philadelphia. It's the house where he wrote several famous stories, including The Black Cat. I visited the basement that probably inspired that story.

As I walked around that city I used to think about Poe, and all the other American figures who had lived there, and how their DNA, their souls, are part of what make up that town. And that town is part of what made up their souls, their DNA. 

And now mine. And now mine. 

Currently, I live in Denver. For a bunch of sentimental and/or metaphysical reasons I won't go into, Denver is a place I've always kind of felt was "home" to me, even though I only set foot in the town a few times up until 2022 when I actually moved here. The routes I drive, the ever-present foothills on view to the west, these have become my new reality, my new identity.

A few weeks ago, I flew back to Houston to see my best friend. We drove to the house I grew up in, the house where he and I spent many of our formative years together, where we played, and laughed, where we cried and got hurt. I looked at that house and that street and I felt a profound sense of personal identity and, at the same time, a complete sense of detachment. I felt everything and nothing about that place, that home. 

A few days later, about to fly back to Denver, walking to my gate at Houston Intercontinental Airport, an airport I was in every other weekend of my childhood but which was now pretty much unrecognizable to me, I walked by a gate that read "Washington Dulles." I walked by another that read "Philadelphia." I walked by another that read "Newark." I looked at the people waiting at those various gates. Were they returning to a "home,” to places that I used to call home? I felt everything. I felt nothing.

Have you felt this way? Have you been in a place that felt like home the moment you stepped foot in it? Have you wondered what happened there before you, what will happen there after you? 

Write it down and send it to Atticus Review.

We are opening submissions on the theme of HOME until Thanksgiving Day. Any genre you like up to 5,000 words.

If you’re looking for some inspiration, try watching the interview below. In the middle, Boo talks about how there can be “unseen energies” in a poem. There can also be “unseen energies” in a place. And sometimes those unseen energies, the ones in a poem and the ones in a place, are the same thing.

Show us those unseen energies.

Thanks for reading.

David Olimpio
Publisher