The first morning I walked my youngest son to kindergarten the soft sun cut his hair into shards of lit hay. Our arms swung in unison, big hand leading small, and I heard his book bag thwack his back twice for every step I took. I thought I would feel free, would feel the sky dive beneath me, lift me above the school. I wanted to leap into career, be something Big, someone Big, Important, be a damn Big Shot.

If you had asked me that moment anything about poetry I would have laughed, would have remembered my eleventh grade teacher, the one with the black leather jacket and perpetual sneer. Mr. Adamski ruled the room with seventies hip, with well-timed cuss words and the scent of clove cigarettes wafting around careful words.

"Ladies and gents," he'd say. "Open your fucking poetry book."

The class tittered, flinched. More than one of us checked the closed door to be sure the Vice Principal wasn't scouring the halls with his brillo pad attitude.

"Turn to page 51. Let's recite."

We'd punch out vowels that Plath once held, consonants from Ginsberg's pocket, yell stanza after stanza into the stale air. I loved it, loved the bounce of my voice against the others', the way Mr. Adamski leaned back in his wooden chair, booted feet secure on desk, his eyes closed in rapture as if our chants brought him closer to that good rolled hash he enjoyed after hours.

Most poems didn't make sense to me. The smart kids got it, could chat with Teach about hidden metaphor, about Plath's suicidal angst. I sat in back with the potheads, with the shop-class crowd, a scuffed home ec book under my seat instead of the Latin texts the front-seaters carried.

I love these sounds. I love these sounds.

I remember reciting this mantra, remember trying to pry something other than ear candy from the exercise. Nothing else ever came. The day I quit school, the day I ran from home, the day I discovered I was, I couldn't be, pregnant, the day my mom and dad didn't notice my bed kept lonely watch. I tossed my poetry book into my neighbor's thick hedge. A corner stuck out as if to say Hey! Don't leave me! You need me! but I kicked it deep into the mess of prickly leaves.

Take that, stupid smart kids! Take that! I don't understand you! I hate you! I hate poetry! I hate it! It's only for smart kids and I'm not one of them! Everything is for smart kids! I hate school! I don't want a baby! No one loves me anyway!

I didn't stop running, hitching, crying, until a kind old coal miner left me on a Seattle sidewalk, three thousand miles from that poetry book, a ragged twenty in my hand. I stood in line at the employment assistance office day after day, filled out form after form, met with pasty faced placement officers and nothing, just nothing happened. I walked the parking lot looking for spare pennies, for thirty-one cents, exactly enough to buy a loaf of cheap bread.

I wrote a poem that Thanksgiving. I sat on the deck of a shoddy apartment on the banks of the Nisqually river, back against the wall, frozen, tired, swollen. I don't know what possessed me to take a pencil and mark the occasion on the back of a grocery receipt, but I did. I stuck it in my wallet. I keep it with me to this day.

Nisqually
The water is so black and cold
it swirls with native fish, chum with pink tails and monsoon eyes
they sneak through mirror water and want to leave me a message
but I can't hear them
my ears are full, just like my belly
the grasses below the water collect the message
let it sink to the silt
sink to mud silt

The day after I first walked my youngest son to kindergarten, I knew I was no potential Big Shot. My bills sat in a messy pile on the edge of the kitchen counter. I couldn't pay them. I collected welfare. I paid for eggs and milk with the swipe of my food stamp card. The day I shoved book into briar was the last day I sat in a classroom.

There's gotta be a better way. I hate living like this. I hate the sun, this perpetual arc of harsh photons that never slows. It always looks like summer here, even when my heart is dead. It's been so many years since living on the Nisqually. Life just gets more difficult. It doesn't surrender. I've had no time, no money, no help to attend school. I can only do what I can do.

I remember thinking this thought. I didn't know it was poetry, it was the same as writing words on a dirty page. I didn't know. I paid ten dollars to Avon, got a beginner's bag, ten brochures, two boxes of samples. I trudged through canyon, met educated yuppie in need of beauty, met homeless Latino men who labored long hours in the strawberry fields. I think it was a stretch of upturned earth, a man, a sad man with arms filled with heavy equipment, his brow coated in dirt-crusted sweat, who cracked my two-decade veneer.

This is poetry. This is what Mr. Adamski and Plath tried to tell me. This meager existence, this man surrounded by manure. He is poetry. It isn't a gift for the smart. It's a gift of breath, of air through our pores. Poetry. It's the way I see this world. It's the pain of my Washington State. It's the joy of my youngest son's first day of school. The way he runs, dammit, the way he runs across that clover-laded school yard. Poetry.

It doesn't have to make sense. The words, the sounds can be enough. I can be poor like I am today, be poor and uneducated, a woman pushing forty with failed relationships and no money. Poetry still belongs to me. I can read it, even when I don't understand it. I can love the sound, the scrape of my tongue against palate. I can write it. I get it.

Plath's words resurfaced.

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again."

Some women share this same knowledge, this deep pitch of ink against digital skin. They write their lives through connected words, through the art called Poetry. They know intimately that strange truth I discovered after half a life of pushing it far from me - that words carry more than meaning. They are water, they are essential.

In April of 2006, Publisher's Weekly broadcast a review of online poets, some of whom blog. Not a single woman was represented in the sample, even though women poets have helped charter the internet waters with some of the first poetry blogs. Even when women and some men pointed out the gender inequality in the review some men still didn't get it.

Some literary journals have actively solicited submissions from strong womens' voices. One such online magazine is Mipoesias, which in addition to having published an entire issue of womens' work, keeps an active community of poets of all genders, ages, and ethnicities at the social networking site Facebook. The publisher of Mipoesias, Didi Menendez, tells me, when I ask her why the internet is so important for women poets, "Because the internet is more accessible than print."

Pris Campbell is one woman, a poet, a blogger, who lent her voice in support of gender equality in the arts. Pris write a blog, Songs to a Midnight Sky, in which she tells tales of her own life as well as blogs new poems. I interviewed her over email. Why blog? I asked her. Pris answered:

I'd had a website for around five years before I started blogging a year ago, plus. My interests are poetry, graphics, haiga, and art, so that's what I posted on the website. My webtracker told me that up to 60 plus visitors came to my site each day, but I never knew who they were. Maybe four poeple a year, if that, signed my guestbook. My website became like a filing cabinet of my work, a solitary activity.

When the world of blogging opened up, another female blogger encouraged me to go for it. Suddenly, at least of a portion of my readers were visible. I could see their faces, follow their profiles back to their blogs and see what they were doing.I love the interaction with other creative peopleon their blogs and mine. Best of all, by presenting only one thing, be it a poem, artwork, or just a commentary on something, thereader has a focus instead of being hit with that filled filing cabinet. That makes a blog more readable, too.

Because I have an illness, CFIDS, that renders me mostly housebound, blogging gives me another gift: the access to the outside world that others take for granted. I can't go to poetry readings. I can't travel to meet poetry friends or go to the many workshops. This I can do, though there are times when I have to put up the 'closed for a few days' sign on the blog, too, when my energy wanes or some symptoms flare.

So...why do I blog? All of the reasons above and simply because I enjoy it.

Pris recently posted a gorgeous, fun sexy poem Even Cowgirls Go Crazy Sometimes.

Another poet, Michelle Buchanan, in addition to her own personal blog, runs a website called Operation Poem where she is collecting original poems dedicated to service men and women who have lost their lives in the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I asked Michelle the same question - Why blog? Michelle answered:

For me personally I saw blogging as an outlet for my writing when I first started. Then I quickly learned that it was a unique place to network and connect with poets and artists from all over the world. We have opportunities that writers 20 years ago didn't have with the internet. You can literally start a movement without ever leaving your home. I live in a small area with a relatively small poetry and art community. There are many landscape artists and nature poets in the groups that I have been involved with in this area. Don't get me wrong, I love their work. It's just not the direction I plan on going with my art, or my writing. Connecting with people across the country expands my horizons in a big way.

Michelle's gentle, moving ode to Capt. James F. Adamouski is called If I Could.

Lorna Dee Cervantes is another poet who blogs about her life and her work. Lorna is an internationally acclaimed Chicana poet from San Jose. Her poetry has appeared in countless journals and has won many awards. Lorna answered the same Why Blog question:

I blog to push through the plug of prose, that clot in the lower vertebrae of the soul between the inner eye and the third planet from the mind. I blog to open the doors I hide behind whenever someone knocks on the real. I blog to answer the phone. I blog to always be home. I blog for the dead -- literally. They like it. They like to see their names written in electrons of light, shooting out of the dark or slowly blinking in this self-made sky. I blog to remind. I blog to recommend. I blog to revel. I blog to reveal the bald spot on top of God's head. I blog to call out the goddesses. I blog for the goddesses of documentation. I blog because I lose my calendars even on a good day. I blog like the ocean comes in on waves. I blog like delivering hot meals to shut-ins. I blog to not be a shut-in. I blog to sing, "Yo soy!" I blog because I am misrepresented, misquoted, misunderstood and missed -- often. I blog to set the record straight. I blog because it's never straight and there's never any record. I blog to record. I blog because I can. I blog, because, I am. I blog because I can't sing worth a dam.

Lorna's blog offers commentary, review, and reflection in addition to her original poems. She posted a stunning reflection on New Mexico called The Wing Was Ringing My Doorbell last week.

Please visit these strong womens' sites and experience their poetry, their voices, their incredible echo, for yourself.

Other women poets who blog include:

Carly Sachs
Annie Finch
Mairead Byrne
Barbara Jane Bermeo
Kellie Raines
AnnMarie Eldon
Laurel K Dodge

Birdie Jaworski is a poet, an Avon Lady, and most importantly, a mom.