{"id":13770,"date":"2014-09-12T11:06:46","date_gmt":"2014-09-12T16:06:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=13770"},"modified":"2014-09-12T11:07:51","modified_gmt":"2014-09-12T16:07:51","slug":"ive-got-a-little-black-book-with-my-poems-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2014\/09\/12\/ive-got-a-little-black-book-with-my-poems-in\/","title":{"rendered":"I&#8217;ve Got A Little Black Book With My Poems In"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So I was listening to Pink Floyd, really loud, when I got to &#8220;Nobody Home&#8221;:<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/T87JATb4sLc?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>And I thought, &#8220;I&#8217;ve got a little black book with me poems in.&#8221;<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Actually, I have many, many little pocket notebooks that I&#8217;ve carried with me for intermittent lengths of time.  Of course, since I&#8217;m a pack rat, I own most of them along with countless (okay, <em>finite<\/em> but a really big number) of legal pads that have filled the leather binder I got as a gift from Catherine S&#8212; when I was in high school.  Or middle school.  The same binder I&#8217;ve carried to countless (okay, <em>finite<\/em> but a really big number) of job interviews.<\/p>\n<p>But this was the first:<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/littleblackbook.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/littleblackbook.jpg\" width=\"300\" alt=\"A little black book with me poems in\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I must have gotten this little book in sixth grade, right after I moved from Wisconsin to Missouri.  It contains:<\/p>\n<li>&#8220;The Union&#8221;, a poem that I would submit to a poetry contest I saw in the back of a magazine.  I got an Honorable Mention for it.  As I was a naif and in sixth grade, I was very happy when they offered to publish it.  I didn&#8217;t know the racket then, where presses made a lot of money off of jamming hundreds of &#8220;Honorable Mentions&#8221; into a cheap book and then selling them for $50 to the &#8220;winners.&#8221;  Somehow, my mother scraped this money together from her earnings as an onion ring separator at a frozen foods plant to buy a copy of <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ebay.com\/itm\/Our-World-s-Most-Beloved-Poems-John-Campbell-1984-First-Edition-Book-Hardcover-\/171434766164?pt=US_Nonfiction_Book&#038;hash=item27ea4eef54\" target=\"_blank\">Our World&#8217;s Most Beloved Poems<\/a><\/em>.  It was my first publication credit, but not one I tend to claim on my CV these days.<br \/>&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;The Heater&#8221;, a poem about our babysitter&#8217;s kerosene heater running out of fuel on a cold morning.  We lived with my aunt at the time, the &#8220;rich&#8221; aunt who was just getting by, which was better than we were doing at the time.  She didn&#8217;t want a couple of knuckleheads bouncing around her house unsupervised, so we were packed up to a woman in a trailer park who ran an unlicensed day care.  The first babysitter fired us because we were so much older than her other charges and because we were a couple of knuckleheads, so we ended up at another woman&#8217;s trailer in the same trailer park for a while until she fired us for being knuckleheads.  And then we bounced around my aunt&#8217;s basement until such time as we got a trailer of our own, albeit one in a different county.<br \/>&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>Other miscellaneous poems with horrible forced rhymes, many of which include notations for markets to which I submitted the poems for print.  I was getting rejected for publication in middle school.  Which is just as well, as I think many of them were ads I saw in the back of <em>Writer&#8217;s Digest<\/em> for vanity presses.<br \/>&nbsp;\n<li>I&#8217;ve got a couple other scribbled ideas in there, such as a commercial for dog food.  I didn&#8217;t recycle this when I took a Writing for Broadcast class in college eight years later.<br \/>&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve got autographs from Republican political figures and candidates from the era, including the signature of (then) Governor Kit Bond.  My uncle was active in the party, so I whipped this out for autographs at some function or other.<br \/>&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>A nametag for my uncle from the same function where they misspelled his last name.  He pitched the misspelled one, but I pressed it into my book.<br \/>&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>A collection of autographs from teachers and students at Henderson Junior High.  I guess it turned into an autograph book at some point.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Of course, mine is a relic-based memory, so this little book brings back memories from that era when there are only two people left to me who remember it.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s craziest about that is that I wanted to be a writer and a poet <em>by the sixth grade<\/em> and I was actively pursuing it at that precocious age.  I didn&#8217;t really remember that.  Sadly, it&#8217;s been a decade since I&#8217;ve written a poem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So I was listening to Pink Floyd, really loud, when I got to &#8220;Nobody Home&#8221;: And I thought, &#8220;I&#8217;ve got a little black book with me poems in.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal-relics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13770"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13774,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13770\/revisions\/13774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}