Victory is Mine and The Way Things Are

Victory is mine. Google "Spencer Miles Kimball." I dare you. As of today, four of the top ten search results refer to me. I don't know how this happened, by what fluke I have arrived triumphant, but it pleases me.

What pleases me less is that one of the four hits is a poem I wrote in my freshman year of high school, and went on to have vanity published by www.poetry.com. It isn't that I'm particularly ashamed of the poem. Here, I'll reproduce it, just to prove how unafraid of your judgment I am:

A Story Is...

A story is a woven tapestry,
Composed of golden cloth and silver thread,
Eliciting both dread and rhapsody,
It's on our minds until completely read.
We are drawn in by characters and quirks,
Protagonist with righteous heart and mind,
A villain with a plan that just might work,
And thus the plot of story is designed.
We listen to the storyteller speak,
Or flip the pages of a classic book,
In an attempt to end a tale's mystique,
But you find new import each time you look.
A story's magic can give people wings,
To carry us away from earthly things.

In fact, the only lines I cringe at are the last two, which smack of a particularly late night at the grindstone and a rather high opinion of both myself and the art of words (only the latter of which is justified). Unfortunately, I've now seen too many Red Bull commercials to ever take the second-to-last line seriously. I can only picture someone chugging an energy drink and taking flight--not much to do with stories at all. Still, it is a nearly perfect sonnet, if nothing else.

But you say, "Spencer, that's online! You really paid to have that put online?" And I say, "No, silly person, I paid a website $50 to bind it into a book and mail it to me, even though I had the original." Here's the basic story, in long form. I found this neat poetry website which billed itself as the premier website for poets of our day. In my incredible naivete, I almost believed that. Well, I submitted this poem I had written for a school assignment, and received notice that they wanted to publish it in a collection of poetry, and would I like a copy? I was like, "Crap yes, send me a copy for the exorbitant price tag of $50." My parents paid for it on account of my birthday, so I was a happy little clam when it arrived. And, strangely, my poem was the first in the book. Now, I'm not saying it's a terrible poem, but if it is, so to speak, the best foot forward, and written by a 14-year-old, well.... It occurred to me then perhaps this might not be such a "premier" website. Still, at that time I only suspected that it could be vanity publishing. Then I was harassed for the next two years via e-mail about all the great poetry offers I was missing out on and the $100 value of the trophies I could buy for myself for a mere $20 and the poetry society I could buy a membership in. Well, at that point I was sure.

In my opinion, it's much cooler to have it out there on the web. The book is just boxed away somewhere, but in electronic form it is out there for anybody to read. Slightly scary, very exhilarating. That's the way things should be, and are.

Sincerely,
Spencer Miles Kimball