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Here's how it was. This was way back in the very early seventies. I had recently arrived in Los Angeles from Iowa, where I had been completing a doctoral program and working in the Writers' Workshop in Iowa City. I was a poet. I had never taken much interest in art-though I was educated enough, of course, to be aware of "modern" artists like Picasso and Matisse. I had even, at my boarding school in England, enlarged a blue Matisse flower cutout to reproduce as a mural on my study wall-to the considerable consternation of my "housemaster".

But though I had lived in London for three years in my early twenties, I had not stumbled across anything that would qualify as "contemporary art." Then at the University of Iowa, the Art Department was, to my knowledge, mostly traditional, under the firm hand of the lithography master Mauricio Lasansky.

Then... Los Angeles! The shock of the new! My eyes were opened, first, by my soon-to-be wife, Ellie Blankfort-she of the Ellie Blankfort Gallery fame, during those years in the very early seventies. Soon after we met, she landed a job running the Art Rental Gallery at the Los Angeles County Museum, and she was meeting the younger set of artists she was soon to represent in her gallery. I, the poet, observed nervously from the sidelines, somewhat befuddled by the strange things some of these artists were doing.

I was not deeply offended, however, until the day we went out to see an exhibition at the Orlando Gallery in the San Fernando Valley. I arrived there to find hand-made, primitive axes protruding from the walls; books mutilated with cuts and slashes, their pages stuck together with unidentifiable goo; mysterious-but definitely unpleasant-stuff growing in mason jars; and Vaseline smeared unceremoniously on the white walls of the gallery.

And then there was an inscription somewhere in bold, childish lettering: WHEN I WAS A SMALL BOY, BOB WENT HOME.

That was it. I was appalled. Appalled that someone could create this kind of hideous mess and call it art. I went home angry to have wasted my precious (poet's!) time on such frivolity.

And yet I could not get it out of my mind. To my distinct annoyance, the images kept playing around in my head, refusing stubbornly to leave. The indignation continued to rile. So I did what any writer does, I assume, when confronted with the unknown: I started to write about it.

At the risk of irritating those who've heard me say it a hundred times before, my guiding principle as a writer is that old adage: How do I know what I think 'til I see what I say. I couldn't begin to sort out my ideas and feelings until I had them down in words.

So I sat down and began to write. And I wrote and wrote. Judging prose, in those days, to be a little bit beneath a man whose lofty calling was to be a poet, I wrote it all as a poem, and the poem turned out to be some thirty pages long. Evidently I found that I had quite a lot to say, and much of it had to do with the growing realization that this "mess" of an art show curiously resembled how I felt about my life-and how I managed it-when I was seven years old.

My life was all a difficult, impenetrable mystery. Nothing was as tidy as it was supposed to be, not even my clothes. Nothing ever fit quite right. I was clumsy, inelegant. I used to spill ink on the desk and smudge my fingers, and then the exercise books in which I had to do my arithmetic.

It was the struggle between the unruly, rebellious reality of the inner self and the discipline that others want to impose on it from without-the classic struggle for individual freedom in the face of despised and feared authority. Eventually, it proved to be a losing battle for the child and a victory for the teachers. Inky fingers and all, I was forced into submission to the rules.

WHEN I WAS A SMALL BOY. This art was talking about me! No wonder I was so angry and uncomfortable!

Later, when the writing was done. I met the offending artist, Gary Lloyd. (Gary, where are you these days?) He loved the poem I'd written, and proposed our collaboration on a book. We made it-a cumbersome volume with a hatchet handles for a spine, a battered aluminum cover, and pages rendered illegible by layers of mesh and grease-proof paper, and smears of Vaseline. We spent hours in Gary's Culver City studio putting this thing together. We even sold some copies to respectable collectors. The County Museum has a copy.

So there you go. This was the great epiphany, for me, the initiation into the world of contemporary art. It came about through anger and indignation, a reaction so strong that I was unable to ignore it. It came about because I had the intuitive wisdom to listen to that contrarian voice and heed its challenge. In the months and years that followed, I continued making my first few tentative steps into writing about art. I even discovered that prose could prove a satisfying medium. I began to write pieces for Artweek, first, then for Art in America, Artforum... I had found a calling.

About the Author

Peter Clothier is the author of The Real Bush Diaries. Visit his Web site to learn more about his imaginary conversations with President Bush, http://www.peterclothier.com