#005 Backstory of the Poem Ellen Foos’s “Sideyard”

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? The first draft developed in one sitting, then some minor edits as I fine-tuned it and also took it to the critique group to which I belong. Someone actually advised me to take the White House line out of there but I decided to keep it. Maybe it wasn’t such bad advice!

Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail.

I believe I was at work when I started and finished the poem.

What month and year did you start writing this poem?

I wrote this poem in October of 2014

What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? He built the house we lived in all our lives, my mother and their seven children. He did all the repair work himself so the ladder was a constant presence around the house. The neighborhood did change and get built up over the years but not to the extent that it was ruined. I did move to NYC after college for ten years and never returned to live near my parents. This poem is mostly nostalgia for the carefree aspect of childhood.

Ellen Foos’s parents. Copyright by Ellen Foos.

Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? I didn’t know when I started writing the poem that it would end in such a feeling of loss for my father. He was a product of his generation and not particularly good at expressing his feelings.

Ellen Foos (front dressed in black) with her family the day of her father’s funeral. Copyright by Ellen Foos.

What is your father’s full name? Joseph Foos

Birthdate and the day he died? May 1921 – June 2014

Is this an accurate analysis? The first lines of this poem tell of childhood play and innocent pranks in a family oriented safe neighborhood. Then commercialization came into the neighborhood which is identified as New York City.

Soon the elite of New York City such as Donald Trump took over these neighborhoods and created neighborhoods that had no room or space for family intimacy or even neighbors.

Along with the death of what neighbors and family used to be the author of the poem has to deal with the death of her own father. And the realization that she not only lost her father but her way of life, her neighborhood or family or own view of America. There still is hope – even though the side yard no longer exists – there is a ladder that her father left there. How can she reach it?

Your analysis starts out fine but the mention of the White House didn’t have any political message. I always felt sorry when I lived in NYC that the natural world was inaccessible. That probably did enter into the poem.

Has this poem been published before? And if so with where? The poem was published here: Contemporary American Voices (January 2015) https://contemporaryamericanvoices.wordpress.com/2015/01/01/januarys-featured-poet-james-keane/

Ellen Foos is a senior production editor for Princeton University Press and the publisher of Ragged Sky Press. She has received fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center. She coedited Dark as a Hazel Eye: Coffee & Chocolate Poems and Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems. Her new poems are gathered in The Remaining Ingredients and have appeared in Mead, The Curator, Edison Literary Review, and Contemporary American Voices.