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? “The Butterfly Effect” was written in a Writing As Healing workshop run through the U.C. Davis Cancer Center. Along with the other workshop participants, I was sitting with my laptop in a meeting room in one of the buildings in the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, California. The room was mostly white in color, and contained 12-16 tables arranged in a square, with chairs on the outside of the square.
https://health.ucdavis.edu/cancer/education-programs/patients/writing-healing.html
The poem was a response to a prompt provided by my co-facilitator Terri Wolf.
I don’t recall the exact prompt, but it may have included a reference to the phrase “the Butterfly Effect.” I decided to use this phrase as the title for a poem about my mother, who had been diagnosed with lymphoma earlier in 2019, and who was about to start chemotherapy.
BOTTOM: A plot of Lorenz’s strange attractor for values ρ=28, σ = 10, β = 8/3. The butterfly effect or sensitive dependence on initial conditions is the property of a dynamical system that, starting from any of various arbitrarily close alternative initial conditions on the attractor, the iterated points will become arbitrarily spread out from each other.
I had heard of the alleged phenomenon of “the butterfly effect” (the theory that a very minor disturbance, i.e., the slight wind from a butterfly’s wings, can somehow later produce a vast ripple effect) but I decided rather to focus on the transformation of a caterpillar into a chrysalis and then into a butterfly. Drawing on my own experience in 2015 when I was diagnosed with another kind of lymphoma, I wanted to use the image of the butterfly as a (possibly forced and too-hopeful) metaphor for my mother’s cancer journey, to try and give her courage to go through her chemotherapy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? First, I want readers to ponder the superficially bizarre but not completely unfounded parallels between cancer and pregnancy, an idea I have written about before a number of times. More importantly, however, I want readers to understand the bond I shared with my mother, not merely as her son but also as a fellow cancer patient. I want readers to appreciate my wish to encourage her to see her cancer treatment as a positive, transformative process, while also recognizing that this wish is possibly unrealistic and over-optimistic. The word “vulnerable” at the end of the poem introduces a note of danger and doubt into the poem’s imaginative identification of my mother with a newborn butterfly.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? At the time I wrote the poem, the lines that I found most emotional were the following ones:
Trying to find words for the emotional state that cancer induces in people undergoing treatment is very challenging, but I was pleased with the “delicate fluttering / feeling” because it conjures up the expression “I had the butterflies,” which means “I was nervous/scared”. Also, the idea that gratitude can somehow overcome suffering (and fear) is one that I have tried hard to embrace where my own cancer ordeal is concerned. The difficulty of expressing this gratitude, however, is the reason why I find those lines moving, since they connect to other poems from my book The Scars, Aligned: A Cancer Narrative. In this book, I forced myself to give thanks to cancer itself, to my brother (who donated stem cells that guarded me successfully from a return of cancer but also made me gravely ill with graft-versus-host disease), and to the medical personnel who were trying to save my life (while necessarily inflicting pain on me). I was never genuinely grateful for the fact of cancer, of course, but rather for the heightened perceptions of the beauty and poignancy of life that were, at least for me, side effects of cancer and its aftermath.
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https://www.amazon.com/Scars-Aligned-Brad-Buchanan/dp/163534851X
When I showed “The Butterfly Effect” to my mother (to ask her permission to publish it), she took notice of a different passage, and wrote back to me as follows: “the phrase ‘a next herself to test the air’ is speaking loudly to me already! In fact I think this is what I’m doing!” It was gratifying that she had recognized something in the poem that spoke to her situation.
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https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/chimera-by-brad-buchanan/
I must confess that the poem as a whole is now very emotionally charged, for me, since my mother died, in late 2021, of pneumonia, a complication from the resurgence of her original lymphoma. Chemotherapy never cured or even put my mother’s cancer in remission for very long, and she died before the CAR-T cells she eventually received could have any effect. The poem now appears to be a kind of unwittingly dire prophecy, since it is now clear that the “next herself” that cancer and chemotherapy produced was indeed too “wholly vulnerable” to survive for long.
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