#291 Backstory of the Poem: Barbara Crooker’s “A VILLANELLE FOR KIM”

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? I started thinking about this poem when I learned of Kim’s diagnosis, in April of 2020, of breast cancer which had metastasized in several places, including her brain.  I knew she didn’t have much time left, and I let grief pour all over me.  Then I began to think about how I might approach writing an elegy, and I decided that the villanelle (Kim and I both did several readings together for an anthology of villanelles, called Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle (Kelsay Books) would be a good container for this grief. 

Plus Kim had brought me in to the West Chester Conference on Form and Narrative, where I participated for several years in a symposium on Forgotten Women Formalists.  From that symposium, the journal that Kim edited, Mezzo Cammin, was born, as was the Mezzo Cammin Women’s Time Line Project.  I participated in both of these, and wanted to honor Kim with a formal poem, as she was such a champion of women’s formal poetry.

https://www.mezzocammin.com/

Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. Where I always am, in a corner of the dining room, as I do not have an office.  Nothing noteworthy about it; I started, as I always do, on lined yellow paper with a 0.5 rollerball pen.

What month and year did you start writing this poem? June of 2020, with a slight revision in July.

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?) Unusually for me, this poem is pretty much the first draft.  I did do a tiny bit of tinkering, but that was it.

Barbara Crooker’s rough draft to the poem A VILLANELLE FOR KIM. Credit and Copyright by Barbara Crooker.

What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? What a remarkable, fearless woman Kim was.

Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? The epigraph, with her name and dates.

Kim Bridgford’s life in pictures.

Has this poem been published before?  And if so where? It was published in Presence, the first place that I sent it to (they had also published Kim), in 2021.

https://www.catholicpoetryjournal.com/kim-bridgford

Kim Bridgford and Barbara Crooke rin 2018.


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.

The other images are granted copyright permission by the copyright holder, which is identified beneath each photo.

Some of the links will have to be copied and then posted in your search engine in order to pull up properly

The CRC Blog welcomes submissions. Contact CRC Blog via email at caccoop@aol.com or personal Facebook messaging at https://www.facebook.com/car.cooper.7

Share and Enjoy !

Shares
Follow:
%d bloggers like this: