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? “No Egg, No Pony,” is one of two prose poems in my forthcoming book of poetry, Even When We Sleep, due out on March 1st, from Black Widow Press.
On March 18, 2020, I heard Yo-Yo Ma perform “Songs of Comfort” on PBS. He explained that at the start of the pandemic, he composed one song each day. He encouraged the audience to do the same.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/yo-yo-ma-on-encouraging-songs-of-comfort-amid-global-crisis
I began to write a “comfort song” each day and kept the project going for several months. The process of writing a daily song comforted me, deeply. I couldn’t control the pandemic, but I could control the space of the page. The first draft of “No Egg, No Pony,” came to me on February 4, 2021.
I did not have a “conceived idea,” about this poem. Instead, I stayed open each day to the songs and stories that arrived. This one is part-memoir and also prose poem. It opened a door for me to visit scenes from my early life in Rockville Centre, Long Island, where I grew up as a child. We moved to Long Island when I was three years old. My father had gotten in trouble with the law in Montgomery, Alabama, where I was born. We first rented a house in a working-class section of the village. We were so poor we could barely afford food. So the idea of winning a pony at an Easter Egg hunt seemed like magic. I remember the taste of dust from the arena where I didn’t win. My Jewish identity comes into play in this poem, as it does, often, in my work.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I wrote this at my computer in our basement on Blueridge Drive. The room is still filled with my daughter’s surplus stuffed animals––she’s 37 now, with a one-year-old son! I have many of my beloved poetry books here, signed by Yusef Komunyaaka, Adrienne Rich, Lucille Clifton, and other great poetry godparents. My French poetry books are well within sight. Rimbaud and books on Rimbaud fill up two shelves to my right. His prose poems opened my mind to the possibility of writing them, decades ago.
On the walls to my left, there are two beautifully framed sepia portraits of my maternal great-grandparent, Ernestine and Julius Bernheim. I love looking at them, though I want to loosen Ernestine’s bonnet and white collar!
Around the corner from my workstation, my husband is typing on his computer.
Lou Gross is a math-ecologist, who is still teaching at UT, for the moment. He will likely retire, this spring. When he talks to his students online, he’s loud and my writing ceases. Oy! I adore him, though. He is my mainstay.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? Looks like I wrote a first draft of this poem on January 24, 2019, about ten months into the daily work on the “comfort” series.
Recently, with the encouragement of Joy Harjo, I started to write a memoir. This poem gives you a hint of what my memoir sections might look like. The poem in hand, though, fits into a section of the poetry manuscript––about family history, Jewish identity, the Holocaust, and work at healing. Writing is in itself a healing act. We cannot remove the scars, but we can honor them by remembering.
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? The tricky thing about writing a prose poem is keeping it tight enough to make it rhythmically interesting, but loose enough to tell the full story. I honed the diction a bit every day. For example, I changed “hidden” to “jammed,” to describe the way a politician would have made the egg disappear in his pocket! Editing was more a process of revving up the diction than of eliminating lines.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? I want the reader to picture me as the child who lost a dream––what child doesn’t dream of a pony?––but who gained “a magic slate.” I loved holding the “pen” that let me write on the slate. I loved drawing, but also writing! So this loss of a prize also tells the story of my life as a writer. When there were losses, I recorded them, made them into pictures and stories. My life as a writer is part of the story of this poem.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? This poem is an organic whole to me, so no single line stands out as “most emotional.” I vividly remember Rudy, the dude who lived in our guest room while we were renting the house. I can smell the alcohol coming off his rough beard, and picture his red face. His room was right next to the children’s bedroom, at first. Lucky for us, he had to sell the house to us, cheaply, to pay a gambling debt. After that, my sweet-smelling Montgomery Grandma stayed in that room when she visited. Loss became gain, though it took time and hard work on the part of both of my parents to secure the house.
Has this poem been published? And if so where? This poem has not been published yet, but it will appear in my forthcoming book, Even When We Sleep, from Black Widow Press, March, 2022. ISBN: 9781737160328.
Available at good bookstores and from online retailers. I’ll attach the ad that will appear in Poets & Writers, the March/April issue.
Marilyn Kallet recently served two terms as Knoxville Poet Laureate, June 27, 2018-July 2020. She is the author of 19 books, including Even When We Sleep, 2022 and How Our Bodies Learned, 2018, poetry from Black Widow Press. She has translated Paul Eluard’s Last Love Poems and Benjamin Péret’s The Big Game, among others. Dr. Kallet is Professor Emerita at the University of Tennessee, where she taught for 37 years. She also hosted poetry workshops and residencies for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, in Auvillar, France, from 2009-2018. She has performed her poems across the United States as well as in France and Poland, as a guest of the U.S. Embassy’s “America Presents” program. Her poetry appeared recently in Still: The Journal of Appalachia, Plume and 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium, among others. She is the author of two children’s books, Jack the Healing Cat and One For Each Night: Chanukah Tales and Recipes, Celtic Cat Publishing.
Dr. Marilyn Kallet
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