short answer: my artist side.

long answer: poole arrived on 2/8/84 when i quit my first job after college (p.r. company in d.c. on pennsylvania avenue) and, wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, took the bus to my parents’ house (i was living above the garage) and told mom.

And I began operating again on my poetry, tweaking and blowtorching, thinking i would be famous someday. but the next week i ended up with a job (minimum wage) at a landscaping company (with two brothers who owned harleys and one guy who was legit. evil and lived in his car), spreading mulch and cutting lawns. in early april i was the runner-up at choate to be poet- in-residence for a year. and then a week later i received a letter from brown: i was one of eight students accepted into their m.f.a. program for poetry. my back-up plan before this envelope arrived was to move to cali and work and live in the woods to establish residency—and try to attend berkely for grad. school. and the crazy thing: brown was only grad. school whose deadline i made.

and i started painting that summer, too. mostly black and white, drip paintings. using old window shades i found in my parent’s attic nailed to a plywood wall (i still have a few of these stored in a cardboard tube in my basement).

and i arrived in prov. in late august of ’84 as poole.

i convinced the owner of an outdoor equipment store to hire me as poole. and my professors and classmates and co-workers called me poole. i signed all my work poole. i wrote a play and some undergraduates staged it in a black box and i was poole the play write. and i wrote and edited from midnight until five am. and i published random poetry in random, long-since-gone places. and i wrote a really long book of poetry (added my paintings as illustrations) about a fictional uncle who served in vietnam. and then in ’86 michael harper, my advisor at brown, suggested i send an eight-page poem he liked to cottonwood. and it was published in an edition featuring up-and-coming black artists (after my o’tel buried his best friend in the rain, the next poem in cottonwood was crafted by rita dove, a future poet laureate). but othing really happened after “the big break.” and that was the last poem poole ever submitted.

i had realized a few things by graduation: that there was no money in poetry—at least for me—and no audience; that poetry worked best as a public, visual art (i staged an outdoor sculpture exhibit of a dozen, two-line poems painted on plywood and staked in grass--and made the front page of brown’s newspaper); that i wanted to give back (i was a lifer at hawken in cleveland) by teaching adolescents (my dad, the son of a coal miner forced to drop school in sixth grade and become a breaker boy, always told me, “your education is your inheritance.”) so poole’s hair was now short and tom quigley would show up as an english teacher and soccer coach at a boarding school in vermont that fall.

and i thought this career choice would give poole summers to work on thatc ollection of two- line poems (one for every day of the year)—and to keep painting. but i never imagined how much i would love teaching. and then i met tara. and hopewell. and dylan. and emma. and dune. And life sometimes happily messed with my pre-conceived visions (the nonplan is always part of the total plan).

and as years disappeared, i kept scribbling in notebooks and painting in basements—just for me. i realized the artist/fame thing didn’t matter much to me anymore since i had so many blessings. But following my visions to create my best art did still matter intensely. still. and over the next twenty-five years i managed two exhibitions at pds and another in the hopewell freight shed—and sold 405 paintings to friends and family and people who knew me. but those events seemed like distractions—and I hated self-promotion and marketing. I just wanted to paint.

oh. i picked the name of poole on a drive out to aquinnah. I must have benn maybe sixteen. i saw the name stenciled on a mailbox, and it seemed symbolic and deep--but i also liked the unnecessary small case e (oh: i have been writing without caps since ’82—and i started using letters for words [see and sea = c…and fusing numbers to words [tomorrow = 2morrow] since ’83. i also realized that the two o’s in poole made a pair of glasses—and glasses change perspectives--how life is seen—or not—and my artisitic signature arrived.

i guess poole started off as my alter-ego. a guy who wanted to shed expectations of family. and create some fantastically different life in some radical, unexpected way. and the artistic fame thing. but during long covid, i felt more like a humbled village idiot, happy to just walk the outskirts of town—and disappear into my basement to create again. to merge my words with my art.

but the thing about the village idiot: you always want to know what he’s thinking.

i bet if early poole was on a sidewalk somewhere, he wouldn’t recognize me now.

i warned you: this was the long answer.

poole

(up never give)