The thing about beginnings is that there are so many points to choose from along the arc of time. One story begins with me as a girl on Dover Beach, Barbados, walking in the white sand and listening to my grandfather, Gordon Bell, and his friends recite poems aloud as they strolled, men with names like Nealton Seal and Bruce St. John, men I later found listed in anthologies of Caribbean writers. The sound of their voices lifted on the breeze. Whatever music carried them, I wanted to carry me.
Or maybe it begins in the carpool lane, crossing the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, my mother at the wheel reciting Tennyson as she drove my brother and me in the mustard yellow station wagon, I hated.
At noon the wild bee hummeth
About the moss’d headstone:
At midnight the moon cometh,
And looketh down alone.
She might say, stalled in rush hour traffic, evidence of her once photographic memory and British education. She could recall anything she’d read before age sixteen as though seeing it on the written page.
I’m not sure how it happens to any of us or how it happened to me. To end up in a life of writing is, as I see it, a tremendous privilege. A vocation that sounds akin to “I make a living blowing soap bubbles.” Wispy, intangible.
And yet it has been a thing of almost tensile strength, the frame of the house in which I have lived all these years, even as so much else has given way.
I’d been a kid shuffled back and forth between a tense household in Berkeley with my mom and stepdad, and my father, who was prone to drinking and fits of rage, and who, facing divorce from my mother, kidnapped my brother and me from school one day, taking us out of state into hiding for the better part of a year.
I mean to say that, by age seven, I’d seen some things. After that, we lived with him on the Lost Coast of California every summer and winter vacation in an unfinished house that leaked when it rained. Some days, I was tasked with ensuring my brother and I were fed, finding money on the floor around the house and walking my then four-year-old sibling to the campground to buy eggs, cheese, and bread.
I was caught between worlds: A life of private schools, trips to museums and plays, and this wild and lonely life on the coast. Neither was a place I felt safe, rooted, or at ease.
When I learned to write, I felt something shift. A new power came over me. I remember telling my mother after I wrote a school report on Harriet Tubman, that I was going to be a writer when I grew up. The report was bound in a purple paper folder with a waxy finish. I thought I’d written the quintessential guide to Ms. Tubman and might be called to present on PBS at any minute. In short, I was proud.
And then there was Alice Simon, the bespeckled, bicycle-riding English teacher who taught sixth grade. In her keeping, we read Steinbeck’s The Red Pony, which I loved, and at the end of the year, she bound all my writing together and handed it back to me, tied up in a pink, satin bow.
In high school, Mr. Ward, arguably the school’s sternest and most effective teacher, (appropriately, he also taught Aikido), took me aside and suggested that writing might be something I take seriously. I welcomed the notes he scrawled in red on my papers, the way he pushed me to think harder, say more, and take risks.
In my senior year, the poet Tony Hoagland, his first chapbook out, was dating Betty, the Spanish teacher. He offered a one-week class for about five of us, and we loved it so much it turned into a summer of poetry. We paid him a small fee to continue to teach us in his one-bedroom apartment in North Berkeley. He read us Rilke, had us write poems, and then shared them in groups. It was heaven. I couldn’t write a poem, but I loved trying.
In college, I studied painting at the foot of the Santa Cruz mountains in California. Immersed in watercolors and oils, I was happy staring out a window and down at the vast fields of wildflowers to the sea. Looking at the world through the lenses of color and light, I almost didn’t care what I was observing, as long as I could study its shadows and see the hidden hints of green, the dappled purple. An unexpected tinge of umber.
And then, one day, I saw a flyer for a writing group with Ellen Bass and felt an urge to give it a try. I spent years there, meeting weekly in Ellen’s living room, taking in the nuts and bolts of writing as the wind moved in the limbs of the olive tree outside her living room window. Sometimes, the poets Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar would come to visit, and I’d be invited to write with all of them at ten in the morning, getting the day off to a fine start. When I attended the Community of Writers Conference, Lucille Clifton invited me to lunch every day for a week, sharing intimacies and family photos and telling me funny anecdotes about her life in poetry. Somehow, I had entered into a kinship with poetry and with poets.
I now believe we know who we are, in large part, by knowing who and what we belong to. And I belonged here in the world of poetry. The world foreshadowed on my grandfather’s breath, dissolving into the breeze, in my mother’s recitations at rush hour. In the pages of the early books I loved, and in the hands of teachers who opened those books to me. Sometimes, looking back over the winding path that has brought me here, I like to say that poetry––and poets–– have raised me. And they have. And do. Every day.
Danusha Laméris is a poet and an essayist born to a Dutch father and a Barbadian mother and raised in Northern California. Her first book, The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), won the 2013 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2015 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. She is also the author of Bonfire Opera (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Award and a winner of the 2021 Northern California Book Award.