Origin Stories
In seventh grade, my Honors English teacher, Mrs. Martin, gave us the assignment of making our own books of poetry. For weeks, we wrote poems and put them together with construction paper covers. I can't remember a damn thing about the class besides that. In my mind, Mrs. Martin as a figure has been replaced by my sophomore Pre-Cal teacher, whose name I can't recall. I believe they both had brown hair and wore glasses. The booklet, by now, is long gone, though you'd think that's the kind of thing I'd have held onto. But that year, I started writing poetry; it became a part of me. As I went on to 8th and 9th grade, I didn't stop. I wrote odes to my stereo (called "Black Box") and how transformative listening to music was for me. I wrote a poem about an interracial relationship called "Parallel Worlds" based on a guy I'd met at a friend's quinceañera. I placed second or third in some statewide youth poetry contest for that.
The $50 savings bond I won still hasn't matured.
My junior English teacher, too, had us write poems. Mrs. Goodin. Thinking back now, this seems uncommon. We crafted whole collections and turned them into her. I illustrated the pages with colored pencils. I wrote a poem about the strangeness of seeing my grandmother's body at the funeral home, my first real encounter with death. Another one about refusing to relinquish the pleasures of childhood, swingsets. Mrs. Goodin was a tiny woman who wore stiletto heels and buttoned jackets and skirts. She was intensely chipper and her daughter was a cheerleader—the only popular girl I genuinely liked.
And senior year came Mrs. Williams. She was one of those teachers that frightens a lot of students, and maybe I was scared of her at first. She knew so much that it was hard not to be intimidated. And her life was tinged with sadness. At some point that year, I found out that her husband had committed suicide not too long before I was in her class. And once or twice she mentioned him and got quiet. As we were making our way through the Perrine anthology like we had to, she made other recommendations to me. At the end of the semester, she gave me her tattered copy of The Bell Jar (the exact cover pictured above along with a redesign I did in college). I'd read and loved Plath's "Mirror" in the Perrine, and her gift meant the world to me.
I wonder sometimes how or whether I would have gotten into writing poetry without these teachers, without their encouragement and appreciation for poetry. Or maybe how long it would have taken for it to occur to me to write on my own. This month, Tarfia invited me to informally "grind" with her, which means everyday we're writing one poem and sending it to each other. Yesterday I wrote two. I've never had a regular daily writing practice; it's amazing how much it frees up your self-doubt and inhibitions when you know you have to start and finish a poem in one day. Finally, I wrote the poem about the cicadas last summer that I've been thinking about for a year. And Thursday, I wrote a new poem about my grandmother, dealing with some of the same themes in that poem I wrote on August 18, 1995 (I used to write the date I wrote a poem at the bottom of the page). I've been reading Claudia Emerson's new book, which deals so much with memories from her childhood, some about early deaths, some about how she envisioned age or heaven when she was younger. A poem about her discomfort sitting with her ill great-aunt reminded me of the poem about my grandmother. The old one (written just before my 15th birthday) begins so:
I sat by her bed struggling to
find something to say.
Words were important but few
at times like these.
She was laying down on a hospital
bed in her bedroom.
All she wore was a sky blue shirt
and her underwear.
Bruises covered her body.
The sheet only half covered her,
but she didn't seem to mind.
She clutched onto a newspaper,
but stared away at a wall...
In the kitchen I cut up her
food into tiny pieces
which my grandfather would feed
her like a baby.
Looking back, it's interesting to see that there's little poem-like about this poem. It's straight narrative with largely thoughtless line breaks. Yet I also know that one of the reasons I've held onto this memory is because I cemented it with a poem. It explores much of the same territory as Claudia's—the discomfort of being in that room, what Heaven might be for my grandmother. It also talks about how proper she was, but in a far more sentimental way than I'm willing to write now. I also find my old poem turning more toward presenting a pleasing picture of her as a person and her religion than I'm willing to write now. Here's the new one:
First Death
For months after she died, church ladies
would stop me in the halls to say
how wonderful and kind she’d been,
their curled white hair unmoving
as they shook their heads.
With each hand laid on my shoulder,
I wondered if the word kind
stood in for devout—gold
crosses in her silk jewelry box
stacked to the brim.
Even before her skin was a rasp,
when she called me by my name
and could bring her eyes to focus,
she was little more to me than cups
of apple juice and unseasoned chicken,
tailored shirts up to the neck
and pursing lips. Your hands
are so like hers, they told me
as they handed me her smallest
rings, all her gloves. Sitting
on her closet floor, I pulled one on—
a tawny deerskin leather—
and marveled that she could own
the softest thing I’d ever touched.
In the first poem, I see that inclination in myself to present what is actually happening in front of me—the documentary impulse—but I'm still concerned with the positive spin. At some point, it became more important to me to be accurate, or to show what I think something is really about. I want to call it truth, but I know it's truth through my eyes. When my friend Chris introduced me at a reading a month ago, he used Robert Lowell's line "the grace of accuracy" to describe my work. I'm not sure that it's something I live up to, but it's certainly an ideal to which I aspire.
Epilogue
by Robert Lowell
Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.