Fred Voss
My Credentials are Fine After All
I had always hidden the fact that I had dropped out of the U.C.L.A.
English literature Ph.D. program
as I worked in the factories
and steel mills and machine shops.
I had always felt
ashamed
before men who had been
in prisons
or Vietnam
who had lived in hills
or ridden the rails across half the country.
It had always made me feel inferior and ashamed
before men
who had come out of mental hospitals
after blowing their minds out on drugs
and failed suicide attempts
men
who had been to the bottom
and who had real horror stories to tell.
I had always felt that
no white-shirt tie clean hands and desk and mild-mannered
ivory tower experience
could possibly measure up
to the fierce indignities and trials these men had endured
until my book of poems
telling that I had dropped out of the U.C.L.A. Ph. D. program in English
literature
was circulating around the machine shop I work in
and no one
seemed to take any exception to the fact
and I finally realized
that graduate school had earned me credentials
of indignity and humiliation
just as good as any of theirs.
Page(s) 26-27
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