Dreaming in the Maze of Love-Grief-Madness: Poems by Stephen Fife

When I was preparing to write my memoir of my time at Horace Mann prep school, The 13th Boy, I went back to my high school notebooks and the poems I had written back then. I read over everything to understand more clearly what I’d been going through. I was surprised to find that I knew things at 16 that shocked me now – truths about human behavior and destiny that I had no business knowing at such a young age, and that I seem to have forgotten soon after.

What surprised me the most was how many of these poems that I had no memory of having written. Poems like “Enlightenment,” “The Eagle’s Cliff,” and “The Traveler” were simply a shock to me. I had absolutely no memory of having sat down at a typewriter and developed them. Yes, I had come across sections of each in my notebooks, but they had been very rough drafts. When had I found time to work on such complex pieces while still completing all my homework assignments and having an avid social life? I honestly don’t know.

The poetry teacher who almost drove me to suicide had, as one of his axioms, the pronouncement that none of us would write anything worth reading until we were forty years old. But the fact is, we know what we know when we know it, whether at six or sixteen or sixty. The sad thing, I think, is how much we know early on that we never act upon or simply manage to forget.