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? From the first draft to the finished poem took me more than a year, not that I worked on it every day, far from it. I would return to it every month or so. I sometimes finish a poem in one day, but more often the process is start and stop and try again. I print out a version and then sit with a pen and edit that way, although I occasionally make small changes on the computer in Word doc.
I had already written a chapbook about my wife’s long, painful struggle with dementia (Do Not Forsake Me). She died in April of 2018, about a year after the chapbook was released. I was, of course, flooded with memories, mostly fragmented, of her last years. I also began to try to figure out when we first knew something was wrong, and “Echolocation” came to me, as a poem sometimes does, in one piece. It just seemed to flow onto the page. Not to say it was a finished, polished piece but it was whole in its intent and most of its language.
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It takes place on the lake we rowed across to get to Joan’s camp in the wilds of Maine. It would’ve been almost a decade since this actual short journey to the camp and the first draft of the poem. The handy man for the few people in the area was delivering some Styrofoam to a building nearby. We were surprised and a little alarmed at the bright, artificial fuchsia color of the Styrofoam.
The first few versions had no punctuation at all. Basically one long sentence. Eventually I had to change that for comprehension, but I kept only a small bit of punctuation. I chose the name Mahlon for the handy man; some folks way up in Maine still have obscure Biblical names. Mahlon is in the Book of Ruth, and his name means sickness.
Click on the link below to read about Mahlon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahlon_and_Chilionn
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. As I said the poem flowed onto the page whole, but the “inspiration” for it happened by chance as I was walking up one of the densely populated but well-kept snaky streets of Somerville. As you see so often these days, a house was being renovated. For, I suppose, insulation, the workers were applying Styrofoam in the inside of this skeleton of a house. It was fuchsia. That spurred the memory, and even before I got to my desk, the poem was writing itself in my head. Evening was approaching and I was lucky that one of the three lamps in my chaotic office was functional.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? Spring of 2019, probably in April.
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? As usual (at least with me) there were too many words in the first few drafts. But as I realized I wanted the poem to be short enough to (I hoped) deliver a small blow to the reader’s solar plexus. And I wanted it to be visual and tactile without being prettified. So I began to hack away at adjectives and verbs that might have been appropriate in a longer, more lyrical poem. For example:
. . . startling
the foraging flitting bats in the dusk
dipping and skittering for their dinner
who had never heard such a color before
Ended up:
Startling the foraging bats flitting in the dusk
who had never heard such a color before
Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with “dipping and skittering for their dinner” (well, maybe it’s a bit much). But I felt it subverted the subtle underlying darkness of the theme.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? I want readers to take away a number of things, but not necessarily consciously. I want them to see the irony in knowing nothing about the future. And I wanted to convey the beauty of the wilderness and its strangeness. I want them to be amused and thoughtful about the title and the different ways of perceiving things. And I want them to feel sad.
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Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? First draft, I wrote “Echolocation” quickly and as a poet. Whenever I worked on it as it developed into the final version, I felt great emotion and would come close to weeping. The final lines affected me the most. And still do.
Click on the link below to view the website of The New Criterion November 2021 issue.
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/11
Has this poem been published? And if so where? It was published in The New Criterion in November of 2021. And it is in my new full-length book of poems, Hard To Be a Hero, published by Kelsay Books
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Click on the below link to read about Alec Solomita
https://winningwriters.com/people/alec-solomita
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