New in .poetry: “Carlos” and, sadly, there is a story to go with this one.

Last night I got an e-mail about local events coming up in Toledo from an e-mail list I never signed up for.  Since it’s at least more relevant to me than the other spam I get, I checked it out, only to find one of the events listed for this Saturday is a memorial reading for Rane Arroyo.  Rane Arroyo was my poetry professor at the University of Toledo, and I hadn’t heard anything about him dying; at first I actually thought it was another Rane Arroyo.  I couldn’t find anything on UT’s Website about his death, so I googled his name, and sure enough Rane’s Wikipedia entryconfirmed that he’d died over a month ago from a cerebral hemorrhage.  Given that I get regular event announcements from UT’s English Department even though I graduated in 2006, I would have thought I’d heard of his death sooner.

I’d like to be able to say that Rane and I were close, but I never really got along my creative writing professors, in large part because I was still working through a great deal of immaturity back then.  When I was in Rane’s workshop I had one of those moments, as I’m sure many other creative writing students have, of feeling like the only thing my instructor was going to accept was work that was basically an imitation of his or her own work.  “Carlos” was my attempt to not-so-subtly copy Rane’s themes and writing style, and although I didn’t think it succeeded well as an imitation, it was a strong enough poem that I included it in my final portfolio that semester.  The fact that Rane gave me an A that term speaks volumes for his patience in dealing with me.

Anyway, I don’t think I’d be comfortable going to the memorial reading this Saturday, so instead I’m posting “Carlos” here as my own “memorial reading” for Rane.  (By the way, the two poems I’ve had published, “Freddie Mercury” and “Orange Juice,” were also both written in Rane’s workshop.)