A.J. Thibault publishes the poems he wrote in college
I wrote my first book when I was 10. (Note I said wrote, not published.) It was a mystery involving a group of kids who find a secret door behind a grandfather clock. The door leads to a cave — and that’s all I remember. A few years ago, I was cleaning out old files in the basement and found several poems I’d written in high school. Two were illustrated by the poet, who was not an artist. All of them were uniformly bad. I donated the batch to the recycling center.
I may be one of the few people who didn’t write poems in college. I did read a considerable amount of poetry, but a semester devoted to the English Romantic poets taught by a rather draconian professor (“You WILL learn this!’) convinced me I was not and never would be a poet. I opted for journalism, which resembles bad poetry.
A.J. Thibault
A.J. Thibault is best known for writing screenplays, short stories, and novels. His work has received numerous awards and recognitions — an American Fiction Award, A Gold Star Movie Award, Royal Society of Television & Motion Pictures Award, and many others. His writing generally falls in the science fiction, horror, and suspense genres, although he’s also been recognized with several comedy awards.
In college, some 50 years ago, Thibault wrote poetry. It was the era of the Vietnam War and associated protests. He set the work aside; 10 years later, he also wrote 10 poems when he lived in Los Angeles. With a few minor modifications, he published the poems in 2007 under the title of We Lack a Word: A Collection of Rhythmic Prose and Poetry. A new (and slightly revised?) edition was published in 2015. I discovered it earlier this year when a Kindle version popped up in a promotional email.
What intrigued me: what would a poet’s words sound like, to himself and others, in poems written half a century earlier, in a different time and different context? Would they be dated? Would I have had the courage to publish my high school poems? (I can answer that question: No.)
Some of Thibault’s poems are short, and some longer. The poems are in a recognizable form, although about two thirds of the collection are what he calls “rhythmic prose,” which is not the same as prose poetry. We might call them short creative nonfiction, brief remembrances, and even a very short story or two.
The collection, though, has an overall style — simple language, evocative images, with a bent toward telling a story. This is one example, an almost impressionistic scene that you could easily imagine as a painting.
Kids
Three small children raced
Across the narrow ice
And down the soft hill of the park.
Red, yellow and a dab of blue
With white stripes.
Three small children merged
From a voidless shadow
And cried out in ecstasy.
Three small, yet emergent sounds
Filled the warm air of their breath
And remained floating
Between two glittering
Expanses of snow and sky.
Remained floating.
A small patch of grass in our memory,
A soft tune in a glowing field
Broken only by the upright
And dark foreboding trees of age.
His subjects vary widely. In addition to children, he considers sunrises, pterodactyls, education, the “money” of autumn, books, self-awareness, and more. The prose selections include being in civic hospital at age four, the consequences of your ice cream choices, hockey, trench warfare, fast music and cars, missing a family pet, and others. Most of both the poetry and the prose lean strongly in the direction of storytelling; it’s not a surprise that his career took him in the direction of screenwriting and fiction.
Thibault’s novels include Deadly Serious, Sway, Keeping Score, and How to Change a Law. He is also the founder of iLobby, which focuses on children’s health education and financial literacy. He attended Ryerson University in Canada and received his MFA degree from UCLA’s film school. He lives with his family in northern California.
We Lack a Word proves you can revisit your youth and publish what you wrote then — and still be proud that you did, because it is eminently worth publishing today. I do have to say, though, that I’m still glad I didn’t publish my own poems (with illustrations) from high school.
Photo by Gerry Knight, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
- Poets and Poems: A.J. Thibault and “We Lack a Word” - September 30, 2025
- Poets and Poems: Catherine Strisik and “Goat, Goddess, Moon” - September 25, 2025
- Poets and Poems: Andrea Potos and “The Presence of One Word” - September 23, 2025
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