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 symbol of Wales, where I was born, is a fire-breathing dragon, a creature both fierce and mythical that appears on its flag. In most of my memories of my mother, who died when I was child, she is covered with smoke from her filter less Chesterfields. I think that image is what got me started, my mother, a fire-breathing dragon.
Click on the link below to read about the Symbol of Wales.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/flag-of-Wales
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I wrote “Mean Time” when I spent a month writing at The University of Wales Trinity Saint David, in Lampeter, an ancient Welsh speaking town in Ceredigion. I felt both alien and at home.
Click on the below link to read about The University of Wales Trinity Saint David in Lampeter
https://www.uwtsd.ac.uk/lampeter/
Copyright by Peter. R. Murphy.
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? Most of the first draft disappeared as I revised the poem. Over six months and 21 drafts I did a lot of chiseling, adding back and rearranging. Here is draft 1, written May 28, 2014.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? All of it. My relationship with my mother is complicated. I didn’t learn until I was an adult that she killed herself. I was seven years old and hadn’t lived with her for almost a year before she did herself in, but I still felt in some way that I was responsible. More than sixty years later, I am still confused, and most of what I write, poetry and prose, is trying to understand her…me…us.
Has this poem been published? And if so where? It was published online and in print in Rattle, Fall 2016.
It also is the title poem of a chapbook, Mean Time, published in 2019 by Moonstone Press in Philadelphia
https://moonstone-arts-center.square.site/product/murphy-peter-e-mean-time/85
Click on the below link to visit Peter R. Murphy’s website
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