Process Notes: A Being Admitted as Heir

74º ~a line of pop-up storms moving north to south, an oddity, radar-indicated rain non-existent on the ground, our days are reaching the 90s now

∞

Yesterday, I started reading Safiya Sinclair’s amazing book, Cannibal, and I hope to post reading notes about it in the next few days. (I’m only halfway through.) Born in Jamaica, Sinclair looks closely at postcolonial identity and focuses both on the personal and the historical. As I was reading, I was struck by an early poem, “Pocomania,” in which the speaker addresses her father, using “father” as anaphora. It opens:

Father unbending father unbroken father
with the low-hanging belly, father I was cleaved from

In Sinclair’s poem, the speaker deals with a tense, difficult relationship, just as I have been doing. In fact, at one point in the poem she writes, “Father / and his nest of acolyte women” … “Mother and I were none of them.” I had to stop reading for a minute to catch my breath.

Even as I read the poem, I knew I wanted to write one using the same repetition, but this morning, approaching my desk, it struck me, again, that I’ve written little of my mother. So, I sat down to write a mother poem, using the structure Sinclair presents. Sinclair’s poem is one long stanza filled with long lines, and jam-packed with electric images that expose a flawed man who caused his own child to hurt. I tried for the same long lines, the same electric images, but I was working with a healthy relationship, and that changed a few things.

There is a place in Sinclair’s poem where the speaker implores, “Father forgive my impossible demands.” I didn’t draft my poem line by line to imitate Sinclair’s, but I knew I wanted to include such an asking for forgiveness. In my draft, this occurred in line 7, and I wrote “Mother forgive my silences.” Because of the content of that line, it begged to be set off by itself, so I ended up with a 6-line stanza, followed by a single line, then another 6-line stanza and another single line of asking for forgiveness. Then, I started in on another 6 lines and I came up short. I have no idea where this poem wants to go or how it wants to end.

Here’s the issue: poems about difficult things have built-in conflict, which means they have a built-in need to end, to resolve, even if they are largely lyric (image based) rather than narrative. This poem about my mom is a poem of praise, an ode (although not in the formal sense), and I’m struggling with how to resolve it. It is pure lyric, so there is no narrative to wind to a close. I confess that I hit the wall with this draft, and today, the wall won. I had to save & print the draft unfinished, which takes a bit of the shine off the moment.

I’m going to seek out some poems of praise and check out how they end. I’ve always known that “happy” poems were harder to write than difficult ones (for me at least), and here’s the proof, again.