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 knew I wanted to write a poem about Barbie for Limp Wrist’s Barbie issue. I’d sent them a poem I liked about Dolly Parton for their Dolly issue and was disappointed when they didn’t take it. I like to alchemize rejection into motivation! So, when the call for Barbie submissions came, I settled down in earnest and turned on my Barbie vibe.
Click to read the Limp Wrist’s Barbie issue.
https://www.limpwristmagazine.com/barbie
First, I cut and paste a couple of words and phrases from my word bank, a 250 page list of words and phrases that I maintain for inspiration. I pasted Yes Yes and She smiled harder and harder and also some others that I later removed.
So I had a couple of words and phrases, but I needed more, so I researched Barbie and learned I’d owned a “Bubble Cut Barbie.” Oh my God, how great is that? Consonance, alliteration and a conflicted image—bubble is cute, and cut is violent. Perfect. I knew I had my title. I found a description of a Bubble Cut Barbie for sale on Etsy, and I pasted the description onto my draft to plunder:
Barbie has dark pink lips that are very full, big blue side glancing eyes, black eyeliner and dark brown, thick eyebrows. She has beautiful titian colored hair in the bubble cut style…She comes wearing a vintage blue and white stripe Premier bathing suit.
Titian colored hair…what’s that? Could they mean the famous Renaissance painter? Turns out they did because “he liked to paint red-haired women.” I found this odd and surprising—that such a commercial product drew its references from the Renaissance. I knew I had to include Titian hair. I also pilfered the marvelous side-glancing eyes, the striped bathing suit, and—from the accompanying Etsy photo—the image of a cellophane-covered box, like a glitzy coffin, where Barbie lay as if in suspended animation.
Click to read about the Renaissance painters
https://artincontext.org/famous-renaissance-artists/
Once I had these words and phrases, I began. I’d been reading Sylvia Plath’s poetry and her new biography, Red Comet, so the phrase “Little Lazarus” appeared organically, and it seemed appropriate considering the time— mid-century, when Plath struggled with issues of appearance, clothes, make up, marriage; how to be a wife, mother, and also a genius-poet. She struggled and struggled, the whole time looking gorgeous. Her demise haunts the poem and raises the stakes.
Click to read about Sylvia Plath
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sylvia-plath
Click to read Sylvia Plath being interviews
Click to listen to Sylvia Plath read Lady Lazarus
Click to order Red Comet from Amazon
Click to read visit Heather Clark’s website
Of course, my mind traveled back to my sister and mother maintaining their bubble hairdos, shopping for falsies, and consulting with plastic surgeons, while I watched on the fringes, feeling conflicted, and, of course, playing with Barbies.
At first, I had a long poem, but I discerned its sonnet-like features: it was around fourteen lines and developed like a sonnet—through three quatrains, each one deepening the drama, then a mic drop couplet. So I cut the poem to fourteen lines and numbered them, like this:
This is an early draft— different from the final, but you can see the numbers. I kept the numbers as I revised—a tool to constrain myself. When I wrote I’d never do anything, I knew I’d landed like a falling cat. I often feel a shiver when I write my final line, a squeeze of serotonin.
Then, since it’s a sonnet, I wanted rhymes—which you can see I achieved to some extent, though not strictly sonnet-like, with line endings like her, dark, hair, corner, parlor, skirts, and real, seen, bleeding, anything. The only line endings that are not rhymed are smiled, vulva harder, and stood, which appear at the end of the third quatrain going into the last where the drama and instability begins to peak (a little earlier than in a strict sonnet).
…stripped Barbie’s striped suit. She smiled,
asked me to touch her nippleless breasts, her unfolded vulva.
I said Yes.Yes. She smiled harder and harder.
As Mother and Sister, bee hives polished, stood…
What is a sonnet?
https://www.litcharts.com/literary-devices-and-terms/sonnet
I could have cut the line at unfolded to keep the off-rhymes going (smiled, unfolded) , but vulva was a strong word to end the line, and a good way to begin the instability of the unrhymed words. So, I embedded the rhyme.
The rhymes resume at the end of the last quatrain and in the final couplet, which feels like an uncomfortable resignation on the part of the speaker. The rhymes go from growls rrrr to squeals eeeee, but end like a bell innng:
I whispered in an unhollowed ear: I’ll never be real.
I was awed by the power of being seen. Only seen—
no babies to break me, nothing to enter me, no bleeding,
no dying. I’d never do anything.
What are rhymes?
https://www.litcharts.com/literary-devices-and-terms/rhyme
I chose the rhymes for the pleasure of the music and the exigencies of the sonnet, but now, I see the work they are doing. I’ve noticed that writing in forms, like sonnets and sestinas etc.– provides those kinds of perks. When a topic is difficult, it is helpful to turn to form. Currently my mother with whom I have a fraught relationship— is going into assisted living. Writing pantoums about her decline is therapeutic! The form reveals meaning.
What is a Pantoum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantoum
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. Every morning, while it’s still dark, I sit with my laptop in my living room in a purple plush chair, facing a view of field and forest. The dog’s at my feet and I sip on Pu Erh out of a clay mug fashioned by my son-in-law. Same time, same place, everyday, without exception. Bad ergonomics, I know. Someday I’ll develop a different posture as I write, but I stand frequently, stretch, and walk the dog for a few minutes. That’s a lie, or maybe an aspiration, I work in a frenzy and can barely stop myself.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? Looking into my Google history, I see I began on November 10th, 2021 at 9:43 in the morning. I have ten pages of drafts and it was mostly finished on November 18th at 10:24 a.m, although I did place it in my document of “finished” poems and continued to tweak it there. This poem came quickly compared to others, which is good. I had a deadline.
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? Here’s a very early draft with lines I moved, revised, or excised. The opening was taken from my word list: It was like undressing my soul. An OK line, but merely an entry to the poem, and, therefore, had to go. Most of the original lines have been changed or moved:
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? I want them to feel! I think it was Lucille Clifton (Below) who’d say, after a poem was read aloud, “Do you feel it?” That’s the most important quality—when a poem changes the tenor of the room.
Click to read about Lucille Clifton
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/lucille-clifton
Click to hear Lucille Clifton reading The Killing of Trees
But to be more specific, it was hard to be a little girl surrounded by retrograde ideas about women—the linking of their power and appearance. It was materialistic, synthetic, a worship of false idols. Odder still, was the sexual frission I felt when confronted with the fetishizing of the female form. I found it both repellant and alluring. I want my readers to feel that ambivalence, but if they feel anything, that’s cool.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional for you to write and why? Talking about my sister and mother at the beauty parlor. I hated it there. I was bored, conflicted, and grossed out. I dreaded growing up, felt anguish about the pressure to become a manufactured babe that enticed men like a praying mantis. I knew I couldn’t do it!
If I were young today, I would probably identify as non-binary. I think that might be why, when I was a high school teacher, my room was a sanctuary for LGBTQ kids. Somehow they knew I identified with them. At sixty-five, I feel settled into my identity. My gender and sexuality don’t emerge consciously as a problematic issue, but in the way of poetry, when I write about my childhood and early adulthood, I often gain insight into who I am and how I developed. Back then, my identity as a woman was conflicted and confused, and, in my memories, they still are. When I write, it helps me make sense of it.
Read about non-binary
https://www.healthline.com/health/transgender/nonbinary#nonbinary-vs-trans
Has this poem been published? And if so where? Limp Wrist Issue 6…an all Barbie issue! Thank you Dustin Brookshire (Below Left) and Denise Duhamel (Below Right) for publishing it!
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/denise-duhamel
Dion O’Reilly’s debut book, Ghost Dogs, was published in February 2020 by Terrapin Books. Her second collection, Sadness of the Apex Predator, was chosen for the 2024 Portage Poetry Series from University of Wisconsin’s Cornerstone Press. Her poems and essays appear in The Cincinnati Review, Narrative, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Missouri Review, Salamander, and New Ohio Review. Ghost Dogs is the winner of the Independent Press award for poetry, the Dragonfly award for poetry, the Pinnacle Achievement Award for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Award.
Click to order Ghost Dogs from Amazon
She teaches poetry workshops in a little house full of wild art situated in the Santa Cruz Mountains (also on Zoom!) and she is a member of The Hive Poetry Collective, which produces poetry podcasts available on Spotify, iTunes, and anywhere you download your podcasts. You can also hear The Hive most Sundays on KSQD 90.7 FM in the Monterey Bay area.
Click to visit Dion Lissner O’Reilly’s website
Most of the BACKSTORY OF THE POEM 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