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 in a fiery master class with Natalie Diaz, just before her Pulitzer Prize winning book, Postcolonial Love Poems came out. The class was hosted by an amazing poetry festival called LitFUSE held in rural central Washington state each year. It was September and we approached the workshop through pear and apple orchards bursting with fruit. It was a quintessential fall setting. Diaz was brilliant and filled the whole room with her energy and enthusiasm. The class was held for about 25 of us in a small art gallery. We had local artists’ paintings to look to for additional inspiration for our poems.
https://www.nataliegermainediaz.com/
https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/postcolonial-love-poem
Diaz’s first question to us was, “Where is your where?” She said, “Write 3 to 5 words, phrases or images. Lean toward sensuality.” Her next question was, “What is the language that I (you) make?” This is where I have written in my notebook, the very first piece of my poem: steel needle through blue felt.
She also introduced us to a poem that we gave a close reading to by US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, which I cannot remember the name of now. In the poem, Harjo used four colors as section breaks for her stanzas. Each stanza also had a word like, “beginning, before, after, then.”
I used my own palette of colors and her starting words as prompts to draft my own poem.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? I began this poem in September 2019 (Bottom Left) and it found its final form in June or July of 2020 (Bottom Right).
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?) The poem has probably 20 or 30 drafts before it found the form I settled on and was published. But I am a continual tinkerer of my work. If the poem ends up in a manuscript later on, it might look different from how it appears now.
I am not a poet who saves their previous drafts of poems. Some writers keep every draft, but I am easily overwhelmed by too many copies of one thing. I do my best to make my choices for the poem and move on. Even if those choices are only to move a comma, break a line on another word or change an article like a to the.
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? In earlier versions of this poem I had 4 then five colors and stanzas. Now there are only three. I felt that the other stanzas were distracting and moved the reader in unnecessary or somewhat confusing directions. If the poem is a boat, I always want my readers to arrive at their destination (the end of the poem) as smoothly as possible.
There was a vermillion stanza and probably a crimson stanza as well. But they are lost to the betterment of the poem. It is always painful to cut whole sections of a poem, but sometimes a poem asserts or demands its own needs. This isn’t a case of killing your darlings (though it is in a sense). I always dislike when writers make the writing process sound mysterious, but here I am making it sound mysterious. At heart, I think most poems will tell us what they need if we work at them long enough. This poem needed less distraction, fewer jumps to get to the last hoop–so those other sections had to go.
I shared this poem with my writing group and they helped me to find the final form. They helped me get some of the syntax and imagery smoothed out so that the poem flowed well from one stanza to the next.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? I would hope that this poem allows some of the imagery to be open enough for them to insert their own pictures or meaning into. Ultimately, the poem is about change and the inevitable loss that happens in that changing. A young girl becomes a woman. Flowers fade and wither on plants. A once useful machine is abandoned in a field.
To be clear, a woman is not a flower or a machine. But these are all metaphors that track change. I would hope that readers of this poem can locate similar feelings or instances in their own lives where they have experienced change and loss. To feel a resonance with an image or two. To hope for new life or at least a different life than where loss has left them.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? The first line of the poem, “Before my mother knew me…” was a kind of revelation to me. Since I have existed, I have always been my mother’s child. I knew my mother had a childhood and life before mine, but I had always compared it to my own childhood. This was the first time I had considered my mother entirely independent of myself. Where I had slowed down to consider who she was before and without any knowledge that I existed or would exist.
Has this poem been published before? And if so where? This poem appeared in The McNeese Review Vol. 58, Summer 2021.
https://mcneesereview.submittable.com/submit
Jory Mickelson is a writer, educator, and retreat facilitator whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Court Green, Painted Bride Quarterly, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Jubilat, Mid-American Review, Diode Poetry Journal, The Rumpus, Ninth Letter, and other journals in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. They are the recipient of an Academy of American Poet’s Prize. They have received fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation and The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. They’re first full-length collection WILDERNESS/KINGDOM is the inaugural winner of the Evergreen Award Tour from Floating Bridge Press and a 2020 High Plains Book Award Winner in Poetry. A graduate of the University of Idaho’s MFA Program and the former Poetry Editor of 5×5 lit Mag, they live in the Pacific Northwest.
http://www.floatingbridgepress.org
https://5x5litmag.wordpress.com
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