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? After a divorce, I had the good fortune of remeeting a friend I’d known for some twelve years. We began a relationship that taught me that it was possible to have thrill, discovery, and safety live as equals in a relationship. Once I met him in Brooklyn, in one of those odd urban unparks untouched by passersby, a forgotten zone of the city even amid its busyness, near a John Deere tractor parked in an urban wasteland, and his concern for my safety inspired the urge toward the poem.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I was in a tall-ceilinged temporary apartment with courageous, cracked walls, a cheerful place with new family rituals, such as dance parties and hot sesame balls from the nearby Chinese restaurant, in which I lived with my daughters after the divorce
What month and year did you start writing this poem? Some time in the spring of 2019.
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? All the lines were present; the form, however, changed even before I sent this to your fine site.
Click on the below link to visit Edie Meidav’s Instagram page
https://www.instagram.com/meidav/
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? A love poem: the intimacy of safety amid thrill. The idea that one can find new selves begin in the gaze of the Beloved, and that the feeling of homecoming can await.
Click on the below link to visit Edie Meidav’s Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/EdieMeidav
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? The lines about the different egoic forms – martyr, victim, other – I wished to eschew because this period of moulting has proven to be one of the more profound transformations in my life. I have often marveled at survivors of war trauma who choose happiness, and have been trying to emulate them in my neural patterns.
Click on the link below to visit Edie Meidav’s website.
Has this poem been published? And if so where? Not yet. I began as a piano-player who improvised, and poetry offered the closest simulacrum of music-making. Having studied British Romantic poetry, for a period, I published both poetry and fiction, at one point lucky to study with Robert Hass (LEFT), and yet had an agent who told me to stick to fiction. To return to poetry – a first love – provides a different sort of homecoming.
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