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? This is the first poem in the book and the first poem I wrote for this project. (That is not usually the way things go for me but this time it did.) It started in 2017. I took my son to Italy for a high-school graduation present. It was summer and hot and the afternoon (he slept in) and he wanted to go to the Vatican museum, which I hate—not that the art in the museum is bad but the way the museum is structured is that it’s a one-way street and there’s always traffic pushing at your back, driving you through without a chance to stop and linger. I said, I am not going there, but we can try St. Peter’s basilica. We walked across the Ponte Vittorio Emanuele II to the piazza Bernini, but the day was hot and bright and the line to get in was hours long.
Click on the link below to read about the Vatican Museums
https://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en.html
Click on the below link to read about St. Peter’s Basilica
https://www.st-peters-basilica-tickets.com/st-peters-basilica/
Click on the below link to read about the Ponte Vittorio Emanuele II
https://turismoroma.it/en/places/ponte-vittorio-emanuele-ii
Click on the link below to read about the Piazza Bernini
https://www.rome.net/piazza-barberini
Click on the link below to read about Tiber from Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiber
Click on the link below to read about Chiesa Parrocchiale di San Giovann I Batiste dei Fiorentini
We retreated back across the Tiber and walked past the Chiesa Parrocchiale di San Giovanni Battista dei Fiorentini (The Church of St. John the Baptist). I suggested we go in. My son—(LIGHT) being a terrific traveling partner—agreed. We wandered around and in the back, just off the nave, I saw this gorgeous silver-bronze reliquary of a female foot. Inside were the bones of Saint Mary Magdalene.
I was raised Christian, but not Catholic, so I knew the stories and the narratives around Magdalene, but I had never really paid attention to the idea of relics. I was immediately fascinated.
I wrote the poem on this item on our return to the states, but it set off something in me. There was this whole world of magic and devotion and story that I had never engaged in. The next summer I went back to Rome (I was teaching at the Convivio Conference) and made a point of going to every little church I could find, looking for relics.
Click on the below link to read about the Convivio Conference
https://www.convivioconference.org/
What I loved about these objects was the blending of faith, magic, and story—not just a spiritual connection to the divine (whatever that might be for people) but this gelling of some deep need to believe, that the physical world we inhabit is not just a mechanical entity, but it is a landscape fully inhabited by rich stories and actual magic.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. the Chiesa Parrocchiale di San Giovanni Battista dei Fiorentini (The Church of St. John the Baptist). (BELOW)
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? No, actually. And that is really weird for me. The poem came to me almost complete and it, in fact gave me a kind of voice for the poems that would follow. This voice that both accepts absolutely the claims that the object is making (that was one of my rules for the book—each object is truly what it says it is—but also a sense of play. The stories behind the objects are really what I am interested in, or at least, my versions of the stories behind these objects. That’s where I found the real magic.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? That poem opens the book and establishes the tone, as I said before. It also works to establish the collection as a site of questioning. The fish that leap into/ their mouths like/ answers to questions/ they have not yet/ learned to ask” are emblematic of the reader’s experience with the book. You should move through the collection like you would through a strange and macabre museum. It should be a place of learning and engagement—and reverence too, I think—for the weird and varied magic that lives around us at so many levels in a world that pretends to have everything figured out.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? I think the emotion of the poem is empathy—that’s almost always true. But it came from trying to think about Mary Magdalene not as a trope of great spiritual significance, but as a woman. This woman who has lost her love, who is literally set afloat in a boat with no oars in the sea with this guy who was just raised from the dead and her sister—what does she think? What does she feel? I felt her absolute sense of abandonment and loss. I felt her aloneness, whatever version of the story I turned to. That’s what this book is about—the very human stories in the heart of these magical moments and objects.
Has this poem been published? And if so where? It has not. It will appear for first time when the book Museum of Objects Burned by Souls in Purgatory is published in May 10, 2022 by Alice James Books.
Click to purchase Museum of Objects Burned by the Souls in Purgatory from Amazon
Click to purchase Museum of Objects Burned by the Souls in Purgatory from Alice James Books
https://www.alicejamesbooks.org/bookstore/museum-of-objects-burned-by-souls-in-purgatory
Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, and the author of multiple books including: Half/Life: New and Selected Poems from Alice James Books (October 2019), the memoir fragile, The Belfast Notebooks, The Complete Poems of Catullus, and the edited collection From the Fishouse. He has been an NEA Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University. He is currently professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.
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