Here’s something I’d like to include because it humbles me and I’m not afraid to admit it.

I was young, naïve, inexperienced but eager, joined the Poetry Group at UCR where professors and students and community members all gathered to read each others’ work and put out a little magazine, Poetry UCR. Later, almost by default, I became the leader of the group and editor of the magazine. But that first semester I tentatively and shyly handed in some few things I’d written recently or back in high school, and the professor in charge took them, glanced, said “You’re sure?” and I said “Yes,” not knowing what I was setting myself up for. I had written a short poem about evolution history, titled Primitive, but I misspelled the title as Primative. The poems were duplicated and passed around and the group came to my offering. One of the older students read the misspelling and asked with the cruelty of assurance: “Is this about a monkey, or did a monkey write it?”

I shrank red-faced and kept quiet. It somewhat eases me over the remembered discomfort of that experience to note that, after correcting the spelling, I can point to the published version in The New Infinity Review, Volume III, Number 10, Summer 1976.

Take that!

primitive 
 
and shall I be rock 
to the warm that lizards me 
it is the sky moves 
 
wind pushes 
grass pushes 
 
open on my back 
do what you want 
with me 
take me