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 wanted to write a collection of poems that would explore my childhood, one which was fraught with angst and which eventually not only led me into a career in psychology (and my own psychoanalysis) but which also underlies my writing, not only of poetry but novels and more.
Quickly, I realized that those hours spent on my analyst’s couch could be a trove to be mined. Many years after the fact, I thought back to the stories I told him and used them as a starting point for that body of poetry, which I called Reliquary. This poem was one of the first I wrote after formulating my project. While it wasn’t intended to be the first poem in the collection, once I read it and shared it with my editor, it became clear that this was the one.
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The poem is actually quite close to the memory I had shared with that analyst. We lived in the upstairs apartment of a three-story home that had originally been owned by a wealthy family and had been divided into two apartments after they moved out. Our apartment consisted of the second and third floors. However, for the first few years my brother and I were forbidden to go upstairs into the “dangerous” attic.
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I didn’t listen. My mother was overprotective and smothering and I needed someplace to get away from her and just breathe. What I found was that it wasn’t just an attic but also some usable rooms, presumably one a bedroom for servants with a half bath. Another a conservatory with a small greenhouse. And, then the storage areas. There was so much stored up there to fascinate a small boy. And, yes, in one of those rooms I found boxes of photographs.
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Once I was mentally back in that attic with its patina of dust and those old photographs, photographs that my parents never shared with us, never talked about, I could see many of them spread out as I once spread them. The poem quickly wrote itself. There were so many things we never talked about and suddenly I understood how desperately my parents, especially my father, had repressed his own pain.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I do most of my writing in my office at my computer. I may get ideas elsewhere, but my handwriting is so bad that I find sitting at my desk and keyboarding away is the only sane approach to getting something legible.
Now, I will say that typically a poem doesn’t appear full-blown. Indeed, most of them require days of writing and rewriting. The process is usually to type an original version and come back to it for revision a few times a day for a week and then print a copy to share with my wife. Then, using her reactions as well as my own thoughts as I am sharing, I go back for another week of revision.
As I said, that is the typical process. However, “Boxes in the attic” was not my typical poem. As I recall, it came out almost in the entirety in the first draft.
But, being human and egotistical, at first, I spoiled this piece. It wasn’t properly balanced; too much emphasis on my father and not enough about the photos of my mother’s family. Yes, they were there as well. It took me days to realize that the real pain was his alienation from his parents and that strangely absent brother. I say strangely absent not because Benjamin had died as a young boy, presumably from the Spanish Flu, but because the photos which might have included him were not there. My father was not one to deal with pain. When tormented from within, he would lash out at the world.
So there came another, longer version, which included absolutely forgettable lines about the photos of my mother’s family. When that new version was “ready,” I shared it with my wife. She said nothing. I said nothing. Even the voices in my head were quiet. Without another word, I went back to my computer, deleted that longer version and went back to what I have shared here.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? While very much framed within both my personal experience and my Jewish upbringing, I think this poem speaks to all of us. It raises two separate but important aspects of childhood: that which we are forbidden to speak about and how so often and so desperately and wrong-headedly parents struggle to keep their own pain hidden. Since the entire collection is predicated on my reminiscence of the psychoanalytic process, this poem articulates the need for such internal searching and is a call to reject the repressions of childhood.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? My father and I had what could at best be called a rocky relationship. Although we had established a rapprochement of sorts before his death, he was no more able to discuss our relationship and the pain he had caused any more than he was able to talk about Benjamin. The most emotional part for me was the realization that had I been a better therapist for him that perhaps he would have been able to open up those horrible abscesses of the soul that tormented him and therefor tormented our family. Of course, I was his son not his therapist and so I mourn what he never had to help him.
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