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? My idea was to recreate those early teenaged years, so uncomfortable with all the physical and emotional changes from girl to young woman, but accompanied by an increasing awareness of the world around me. In those days before social media, my information of the world beyond my daily personal concerns—the round of school and family—came from television news programs and from magazines: some of them via my parents’ subscriptions, others of which I glanced through or read on the sly at newsstands in the local drugstores. With each of these public events in the lives of celebrities in the arts and politics, I found myself pairing, and comparing, details of my own personal circumstances at the time.
Photos of Caroline Kennedy as a little girl riding her pony on the White House lawn (Secret Service officers leading that pony by the bridle!), remind the poem’s speaker, as a horse-crazy kid, that she doesn’t have a pony of her own. Jackie Kennedy’s and Marilyn Monroe’s glamorous images are everywhere in those days; and the speaker is a self-conscious, plumpish kid with glasses and braces.
Click on the below link to view Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday To President Kennedy
But as she grows and changes, the teeth get straightened, the hair grows longer and a few pounds melt away, the speaker has later glimpses into the lives of these celebrities; and the progression of their lives (and deaths, in the case of JFK and Marilyn) occur in parallel time in more poignant ways.
The parallelism over time continues, as the speaker of the poem begins to grow into her own, and into a larger circle of experience: “Four Eyes” watching the Fab Four on the Ed Sullivan show is inspired by the super-model of the day to study poise, posture and ballroom dance, so that, several months later, and free of braces, she attends the first Beatles concert in Seattle (the only girl not screaming!).
Click on the below link to view The Beatles performing “I Want To Hold Your Hand” on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964.
Soon thereafter the speaker is fascinated by the relationship between two other musical figures, the contours of which seem clear even from a distance. Her allegiance tilts toward the independent and clear-eyed Baez, who contrasts with narcissistic Dylan and his romance with loving and leaving. Already she is deciding what sorts of people will be her role models – and ultimately she is able to grow into her own and assert herself in the world with confidence and kindness toward others.
Click on the below link AND then click on the blue link that shows up to view Joan Baez singing “We Shall Overcome” at the MARCH ON WASHINGTON on August 18, 1963.
Click on the below link to view Bob Dylan singing “Only A Pawn In Their Game” at the MARCH ON WASHINGTON in August 18, 1963
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I think that I wrote the poem here in Seattle, my hometown, to which I had moved back in mid-2005 after many years away as a “scholar gipsy” (as one reviewer called me)—on fellowships, grants, and visiting poet teaching jobs around the country, etc. In Seattle I could drive past and even revisit the various sites (schools, parks, neighborhoods, theatres, churches, concert venues, and the main “parental abode” in the north Seattle neighborhood of View Ridge) where I spent my early years. While carrying on my life in real time, I could also travel through the various “geological layers” of my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood — observing the changes to these childhood sites while recalling how they looked Back in the Day.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? It must have been in about 2007 or 2008, when I was writing a number of ghazals. I had first attempted to “commit” a ghazal in about 1999, but didn’t have a good grasp of what I was doing. The result of that first effort was a poem I jokingly called a “quasal” – a quasi-ghazal!
Copyright by Carolyne Wright.
RIGHT: Carolyne Wright at Field’s End in 2008. Courtesy of Bainbridge Island Public Library.
A few years later, several books appeared that featured the ghazal as a poetic form—among them Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English, by the late, great, and much beloved poet Agha Shahid Ali. At the time, I was regularly teaching a Craft of Poetry course that focused on several forms. I tend not to try to teach a form until I have written in that form, so I was enthused to write a few workable ghazals. This is one of them.
The click on the below link to purchase Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English by Alha Shahid Ali from Amazon
Note that this ghazal has the radif—the refrain or repeated phrase—at the end of the second line of each couplet, which is one of the formal hallmarks of the ghazal. But there is not just one radif / refrain, but a series of three that vary across the speaker’s early-teen years (“at thirteen,” “at fourteen,” “at fifteen”), following the progression of her age. This ghazal also has the makhta, the poet’s name in the final, signature couplet. And these couplets all rhyme or half-rhyme in two places—the qafia (the internal rhyme that immediately precedes the radif / refrain), which in this case (except for one couplet) is an “es” or “s”; and then the more familiar rhyme or half rhyme at the end of both lines of each couplet. I felt the need to give the poem this additional rhyme pattern that would not necessarily be part of a classic ghazal.
Click on the below link to read about ghazals from the Academy of America Poets
https://poets.org/glossary/ghazal
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? There was one concluding couplet that most readers of the earlier draft thought I should leave out, as being perhaps too editorializing. This was the couplet which recreated or enacted the epiphany I had had at the time, in the girl’s bathroom in high school at age fifteen, talking to popular “Darlene.” Her regarding me with a sort of surprise and fear made me realize that everyone was unsure of themselves, even the popular kids who had seemed to me to be so serene and self-confident:
Darlene feared Carolyne? Such fears must touch everyone!
I laughed: flag unfurling in a new breeze at fifteen.
Click on the below link to visit David Axelrod’s Website
I may restore this couplet in a future volume—there are five couplets each that conclude with the preceding early-teen ages (“at thirteen,” “at fourteen”) as refrain-with-variation; but there are only four couplets that end with “at fifteen.” For symmetry’s sake, there should be five couplets concluding with “at fifteen” . . . and then the poem would have a total of 15 couplets: the speaker’s age when she has this epiphany that has freed her from social fears and allowed her from then on to be the one in social settings to try to set others at ease. With this additional couplet, the ghazal would also have a double makhta—two signature couplets! Naming herself in two successive couplets would also underscore the speaker’s growing sense of self and of self-confidence that have permitted her epiphany in these lines, and her expanding awareness of and presence in the world.
Click on the below link to read about Ghazals and the makhta by E.A. Melio
Interesting to write about all the formal considerations in this poem . . . there are more than I thought of as I wrote it, but I see them all now—another epiphany!
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? I hope that readers enjoy the perspective of a young woman growing into awareness of the greater world around her, as reflected in the parallels she draws between her own circumstances and those of the distant celebrities from popular and political culture whom she looks to, and studies, in this poem. I hope that the deepening values and self confidence that this girl-to-woman arrives at are illuminating to readers.
Click on the link below to purchase “This Dream The World” from Amazon
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? The final couplet in the published poem, along with the after-couplet not included in the published poem—that is, the couplet which recreated or enacted the epiphany I had had at the time: the realization that everyone has fears and hesitations, everyone is unsure of themselves, and that my role in social settings from then on could be to set others at ease. That epiphany at the time truly freed me from painful self-consciousness and turned my attention to the dramas in the lives of other people; and writing these lines that tried to recreate that moment was deeply gratifying and moving for me.
Click on the link below to purchase I WANNA BE LOVED BY YOU POEMS ON MARILYN MONROE
from Milk & Cake Press
https://milkandcakepress.com/product/i-wanna-be-loved-by-you-poems-on-marilyn-monroe/
Has this poem been published? And if so where? It was first published in Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry. Volume VII, Issue 1, 2012. University of Evansville Press.
It was reprinted in This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse Press, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Carolyne Wright.
And it has been reprinted in I WANNA BE LOVED BY YOU (Milk & Cake Press, 2022).
Click on the below link to view Carolyne Wright reading “Ghazal:Early Teens”
https://drive.google.com/file/d/101qdkyNv9Uzm9o73J4cDbgyCf98-fPXV/view
Click on the below link to visit Carolyne Wright’s Facebook page.
https://www.facebook.com/carolyne.l.wright/about
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