#287 Backstory of the Poem: Tricia Dearborn’s “‘[50] Tin”

Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form?  In 2011, I started writing a poem sequence called ‘Autobiochemistry’. The poems in the sequence are mainly autobiographical, but each poem is linked to an element of the periodic table. (I have a background in science, and chemistry is my jam.) I realised I could write about the time I worked at a cannery for the element tin. I had written a poem previously called ‘Cannery days’, and a couple of concepts from it ended up in the first draft of the tin poem, as did part of one line: ‘next year I’ll implode’. From that first draft it was the usual process of revision: adding, chopping, refining, distilling.

Looking at the drafts I have access to, I can see that I experimented with 2-line stanzas, 3-line stanzas and 5-line stanzas before it settled into threes. The last things to come right were the third-last stanza (which took its final form after a useful bit of feedback from another poet) and the second-last stanza – finding a compressed way to describe what the other factory workers did in the breaks was tricky.

Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I’m pretty sure I was in my study. I live with my wife in a lovely old Art Deco apartment in Sydney, Australia, and my study was originally the sunroom – it has windows right along two sides. It contains my desk (a door, painted cherry red, supported by two white filing cabinets) and an office chair; two tall bookcases, one of which is half-full of old journals; one small bookcase that contains my favourite childhood books; a cabinet on wheels that the printer sits on; two piles of journals in boxes (I’ve been keeping a journal since I was 11 and they start piling up …); some art and a corkboard on the walls; a kilim on the floor; and, the most recent addition, a green Art Deco club chair that I bought for peanuts earlier this year – rather battered, but very comfy. I used to have a work table in that corner, but I hardly ever worked at it (I’m more likely to be at my desk, or at the kitchen table) and it just gathered crap. So I decided to get a reading chair. I have not yet read in it, but I cast many admiring glances at it from my desk.

What month and year did you start writing this poem?  In November 2012.  

How many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? (And can you share a photograph of your rough drafts with pen markings on it?)  I can’t say exactly how many drafts the poem went through. Back in the day, when I had a draft I wanted to have a record of, I’d print it off, but these days the way I usually work is this: I have a current, working document, and each time I get to a version I want a record of, I copy it into another file called ‘[poem name] bits’. I keep adding the new drafts at the top of the ‘bits’ document, so it ends up being a kind of reverse record of drafts — but only selected drafts. And not always the whole poem – sometime it will just be a stanza, or a chunk.

There are 21 drafts of ‘[50] Tin’ in the ‘bits’ document – but there were probably many more drafts than this. Occasionally a poem will come through that’s almost finished, but it’s not uncommon for me to do 50 or 60 drafts of a poem. Which I don’t mind at all: one of my favourite things in the world is working in pencil on a printed-out draft. If you compare the final poem to the photo I’ve included, you can see that a lot of material was cut from this draft, and other things had yet to go in (e.g. the bit about the tin cry), but the ending is nearly there.

As nearly as I can tell, ‘[50] Tin’ was in its final form by June 2014.

Tricia Dearborn’s rough draft on “‘[50] Tin” Credit and Copyright by Tricia Dearborn.

Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us? Many! When I write a first draft, I write everything that comes into my head, including bits I know will not be in the final poem. So most poems end up having quite a bit cut as they find their final form. For the elements poems, I often did a bit of research, and that information got thrown into the draft as well, e.g. for this poem the fact that ‘tin is a component of bell metals’. I was thinking there could potentially be a metaphor in there about not hearing the warning bells. But that got cut.

The line the other poet didn’t think worked in the third-last stanza was ‘Someone calls Smoko!’, which came right before ‘The machines grind to silence.’ ‘Smoko!’ is what the factory supervisor used to call out when it was time for a break. A ‘smoko’ is an old-fashioned Australian word for a work break. The other poet thought it didn’t fit with the rest of the poem and I realised I agreed (it had come across from ‘Cannery days’, which had a more casual vibe than ‘[50] Tin’) and changed it to ‘Three times a day / the machines grind to silence’, which also gives a sense of the larger rhythm of the days in the factory.  

What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? That’s an interesting question. When I’m writing a poem, I don’t think about the reader. I’m listening to the poem – listening for what it needs in terms of language, structure, proportion, etc. In retrospect, I’m hoping that the main point of the poem gets across, which is contained in the end: ‘My life’s / shiny surface breached, / revealing the old corrosion’. At the time I worked at the cannery I was already in distress, but I had been trained not to acknowledge it or show it. The breakdown I had the next year was the cumulative result of unaddressed childhood trauma. I hope that readers will be affected, even if unconsciously (which is how I chose them), by words like ‘deformed’, ‘dented’, ‘ruptured’, and the concept of the tin itself crying out before it ‘snaps’, all of which hint at the trouble I’m in, and that it’s going to get a lot worse.

Tricia Dearborn at age 7. Copyright by Tricia Dearborn.

Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? The ending. I’ve found it emotional to read at readings also – I have to steel myself to get through it. Because it sums up for me that experience of having been silenced, trained to pretend everything was ok (‘My life’s / shiny surface’), no matter how distressed you were. Even when things fell apart the next year, it was months before I told anyone. It turned out the person I told was so drunk they didn’t remember it later – but telling them still helped me.

Tricia Dearborn reading “‘[50] Tin” at the Tin Poetry Reading. Copyright by Tricia Dearborn.

Has this poem been published before? And if so where?  ‘[50] Tin’ was first published in an Australian literary journal called Island, and later in my third full-length collection, Autobiochemistry (UWA Publishing, 2019), as part of the sequence that gives the book its name.

Tricia Dearborn’s latest collection is Autobiochemistry. Her other books are She Reconsiders Life on the Run, The Ringing World and Frankenstein’s Bathtub. Her poetry has been widely published in literary journals in Australia, internationally and online, and featured in anthologies including The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, Contemporary Australian Poetryand Australian Poetry since 1788.Tricia was a judge of the 2019 University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize. She also writes fiction: ‘The Case of G: A Child Raised by Trains’ won the international 2020 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize. You can find her on Twitter @TriciaDearborn and Facebook.

Tricia Dearborn at a poetry reading on May 7, 2021. Copyright by Tricia Dearborn.

All Backstory of the Poem LIVE LINKS can be found at the very end of the below feature:

http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/02/will-justice-drakes-intercession-is-251.html

The images in this specific piece are granted copyright:  Public Domain, GNU Free Documentation Licenses, Fair Use Under The United States Copyright Law.

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The CRC Blog welcomes submissions from published and unpublished poets for BACKSTORY OF THE POEM series.  Contact CRC Blog via email at caccoop@aol.com or personal Facebook messaging at https://www.facebook.com/car.cooper.7

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