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 was running through the neighborhood on my regular circuit, having begun a “Runner” series, which basically encompasses my stream of consciousness while running together with observations of places, people, and creatures encountered or glimpsed along the way. I’m interested in how the same place shifts with different presences and with different moods of the runner/observer. Each of these poems takes a different tactic and shape.
So, I’m running along, and as I crossed a bridge, I looked down at the train tracks— constant markers in Roanoke, train tracks and the Roanoke River— and the memory of the boy came up unbidden. I kept running down a dip in the greenway path beneath the bridge past an old electric company, as more and more of his story returned to me in a rush.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. By the time I got home from my run, I had to sit down in my study, which is upstairs in my house, and write a quick draft. I shaped it further through revision, and “Runner, Reversed” closed out the Runner series; it’s also part of another mini-series of reversals.
I was thinking of reversal differently in this poem, though. While a couple of other poems in the book (Not Xanadu) have “reversed” in their titles, those are references to changing up a haiku from 5-7-5 to 7-5-7. But “Runner, Reversed” is about how memory erupts into the present, having one’s thoughts go back in time rather than staying focused on what’s happening in the present.
https://haiku-poetry.org/what-is-haiku.html
What month and year did you start writing this poem? Aug 1, 2019 I drafted the poem. It was a late addition to the manuscript I was finishing up, and I remember that a draft came out in a rush, but even the end-rhymes were pretty well set from the first, which is unusual for my process. I think this may owe to my having begun to write the poem in my head as I was running. By the time I got home and sat down to write, the poem was urgently announcing itself. I could barely keep up with my typing. I usually write long hand when first drafting a poem. Not this one!
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? Yes, even though many parts of this poem were set from the first draft, the opening stanza for example, and even many of the end-rhymes and the tercets in general, there are a few places where I made slight changes that I consider significant, and I continued to tinker with punctuation until the last turn around with my editor.
The change from “brain” to “mind” came about, because, given the context, I thought “brain” was too graphic and thus distracting, since I was talking about gunshots to the head. The recollections of trauma were coming from his mind not his brain, so it was also more accurate. The tragedy is that the images he recounted had not left his mind and were imprinted there, which led to the next sequence of changes. The last change depicted, from “repressed” to “stifled,” came about as I considered tone. I didn’t want a psychological concept to intrude, so I went with “stifled.”
https://www.vedantu.com/biology/difference-between-brain-and-mind
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? How memory intrudes and can overwrite the present— twice in the poem, for the speaker and for the boy. Just as running does— once in the present and again in the past, “I wanted to run home….” Memories, good and bad, come unbidden; memories of trauma can erupt and take over the present.
https://okanagan.ovbc.ca/?page=traumaquiz
The contrast between the speaker’s life and that of the boy, who had already lost everything—both of his parents—by age two, is also paramount. The speaker’s humility in the face of such loss marks the encounter as formative for the speaker. As we grow up, we find ourselves and remake ourselves and our images of the world, moving out from those who raised us to encounter others. Our own lives may look very different by comparison. The speaker realizes that the instability she thought was in her life, figured in the “ranting self-dramatizing dad,” is really of no consequence compared with losing both of your parents to domestic violence in front of your eyes. She is held hostage by the boy’s trauma; she’s unable to move until he allows her to move. This physical fact may suggest some disturbing things about what happens to us when we deeply listen to the pain of others. The boy’s story becomes the speaker’s memory also.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional for you to write and why? It was quite an emotional ride to write this poem. The vulnerability of being a young person attracted to another young person and then realizing what was living inside the other was emotional for me to recall and to try to convey that instant when one is literally pinned down by another’s pain. I think the poem confronts the reader in the same way; it pins the reader down to be heard.
Has this poem been published? And if so where? The poem is published in my new book Not Xanadu, just released from Mercer University Press (2022).
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https://www.mupress.org/Not-Xanadu-Poems-P1176.aspx
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