|
Before beginning the poems that would become The Artist's Daughter, I was re-imagining my childhood—possibly because my daughters were beginning their climb into adolescence or because I was crossing the mid-forties line, while my students miraculously stayed the same age. Eventually my thoughts centered on a single recollection: how often I felt like a monster. The family monster.
Meanwhile I consciously and unconsciously searched for matching images. From my childhood I remembered the fairy tales my mother read to me and my insistence that she read them repeatedly, as if I needed to rehearse lines or to recall the lines or to have another voice help me imagine them. I think she told me she was getting tired of "Hansel and Gretel" every night, but she did continue. It is one of the few memories I have of her absolute attention and marvelous voice—and of how the blend of those frightening tales and her physical warmth was spellbinding.
From the mundane around me I found other monstrous images. Reading the New York Times and the Daily News, I began to clip articles on terrible mothers. From a chapter in a Jung reader I made note of his story of the yukka moth that later inspired the purchase of a second-hand entomology textbook. In my lover's library I discovered other figures such as the carnival "freak" Johnny Eck, the Chinese Malaysian "Pangolin girl" and, in the case studies from Wilhelm Stekel's Disorders of the Instincts and Emotions, I was reacquainted with the infamous necrophile, Lt. B.
Then one evening we attended a documentary based on the book Wisconsin Death Trip. In the dark I slipped out a napkin and pen and scribbled, premature burial. Back home I mentioned my curiosity and he happened to have a volume recording such incidents in the nineteenth century (not surprising since he writes fiction and nonfiction on such topics).
I read this collection of news accounts, most of them tragic, uncertain what it meant to me aside from morbid curiosity. The notion of my previous marriage being "suffocating" felt too easy and obvious. But I was drawn to the language (this is what usually attracts me first: expire, vault, potato brandy,—) and I was taken by the image of, say, a man biting his fingers off in the frenzied realization that he was buried alive. New monstrous images connected to my own.
Finally, away from home and away from my research book—but not my notes—and away from thinking so consciously about what my idea might be (anyway—I know better than to permit an idea to dictate the terms of poem's development!), I sat down one morning and began a list of the book's most appalling incidents, each phrased as an analogy:
Like Lavrinia Merli, in 1890 in Majola, Mantua,
expired from hysteria and placed in a vault
on Thursday, July 3rd, where she regained consciousness,
tore at the graves clothes her peasant husband had just
smoothed around her seven-month pregnant belly,
and where she turned over and gave birth
but was not discovered until Saturday—
both mother and newborn then really dead;
like George Hefdecker of Erie, Pennsylvania,
a farmer, who upon suffering heart failure in 1891,
was temporarily buried until the purchase of a plot
and was unearthed four days later
with his fingers so bitten off his hands no longer looked human;
like Mr. Oppelt, a wealthy manufacturer in Rudenberg
whose vault, unsealed fifteen years after his death,
was found to contain a skeleton
seated in the corner, the coffin lid off;
like the gendarme . . .
The list became the opening section of "Like Lavrinia."
At this point I still tended toward that easy solution, comparing premature burial to a suffocating marriage, but in my gut, I knew it was cliched, simplistic, and emotionally dishonest. I then added "autobiographical" moments and I hoped that—by contrasting the nineteenth century cases with scenes where the speaker was struggling for wakefulness, for feeling itself—readers would experience meaning in the synapse created by those juxtapositions.
Many of the poems in this collection have a similar development but none that I recall with such particularity. Or with that struggle that is so pleasurable after all.
I bring up this poem and its inception because people often comment on the wide range of subject matter in my collections. Obviously, at this point in time, everything is game. The trick comes in the emotional recognition that something can become the experience of a poem—not merely the good idea—whether the source is reading about a cannibal female in Milan in 1890 or listening, for the tenth time, to a daughter's request for a later curfew.
- Return to the Top of the Page
- Go to the Poet's Workshop
Archive ->
|
