In the Extra Years by Roger Sippl is a poetry book. It's about how I spent the rest of my life after I survived, at age nineteen, Hodgkin's Lymphoma, a type of cancer that, at the time, only gave me a twenty percent chance of living further. This book is poetry. Therefore, it doesn't detail everything I did. Many events in my past just don't make good poetry.
I took three companies public, and although it got me the Golden Hat Trick Award from my underwriter, Cristina Morgan, all that business stuff just isn't very lyrical, although I suppose someday I should try to make it so. But there is a little factoid that does make for a good story, if not a poem. Once, for a week-long party with my friends in the Caribbean, I chartered a cruise ship.
It only had 50 staterooms, so it was a small cruise ship, as cruise ships go. Chartering it was motivated by the desire, when I thought I was dying, to just go to the beach with my friends. When I thought I was going to lose them all, all at once, that was my number one thought. Years after my cancer treatment I had some success in the software business and I realized I never took that time to hang out with my friends on a sunny day in the sand. After the third IPO I decided I was probably at the peak of things, so I declared it to be "The Year of Roger" and took my friends on this trip "to the beach" - which became "The Year of Roger Cruise" complete with logowear, fireworks one night, a toga party another, and the inevitable martini-tasting contest with talent show put on completely by my guests.
I did things like that in the extra years. Perhaps all my life I was that way in my mind, but after cancer I lived it - too confident, impulsive and too willing to forget about the consequences of failure. Cancer made me more sure that nothing good was going to happen for me unless I made it happen, and further, bad things were definitely going to happen, no matter what, so I better enjoy my life right now before it's too late.
Whether you call it a good attitude or a bad attitude, it made for a wonderful life. In my next book I'll fill in the blanks between the poems with prose, explain what was going on when I wrote each poem, and what I meant to say by writing it, to the extent I know. But for now, I'll leave you with just the poems, and you'll have the luxury of exactly your own interpretation.
Please let me know any thoughts you have on any of the poems, or the whole collection, at roger@sipmac.com.
While a junior pre-med, at the age of nineteen, Roger Sippl was diagnosed with late stage Hodgkin's Lymphoma. This changed everything. However, after 13 months of radiation therapy, surgery and chemotherapy, Sippl has lived relapse-free for the last 45 years. He started five companies, taking three of them public. He married and he raised three children. These poems are the stories of those "extra years." Sippl studied creative writing at UC Irvine, UC Berkeley and Stanford Continuing Studies. He's been published in a few dozen literary journals and anthologies, including the Ocean State Review and the Bacopa Literary Review. www.rogersippl.com
