Process Notes: In Truth, Dad

68º ~ central Arkansas is easing us into summer with an actual spring (rather than jumping straight to 90º), the humidity does drape & cling, though, as the yard birds signal the business of their day

After a week of family business and traveling, I’m back at the desk and eager to begin a summer of drafting. As with my last post, I’ve written another poem about my father’s passing, another poem that probably doesn’t paint me in the best light as his daughter, but I promised to “Tell the Truth!”

For today, I used my old method of reminding myself before bed and then again on first waking that I would be drafting this morning. Sure enough, the first line came to me even in the half-wake before I got out of bed, and as it came to me, I realized that it was in perfect iambic pentameter, darn it! Apparently, these father poems are falling into forms, and I’m sure my teaching has some part to play in that. In my old job, with basic intro to creative writing needing to cover prose and poetry, I rarely had time to dig into forms of poetry beyond a cursory look at free verse versus fixed forms. Now, I’m up to my elbows in the intricacies of form (and how important it is to both free verse and formal verse).

But, back to my narrative, as I woke, I kept repeating the lines: “There is no devastation here. No death / inspired wails.” Yes, I heard the enjambment there before I counted and found the iambic pentameter in the first line. Who would have thought I’d become this, after years of swearing I had a tin ear?

As I showered, I repeated the lines and more came to me. After dressing, I rushed to scrawl it out in my journal. I confess that I paused then for breakfast and coffee; I paused because I had a healthy eight lines and I knew the weight would hold long enough for me to fuel up. It did, but the rest of the drafting did not come easy. I went into it thinking sonnet (even when I was scrawling by hand), but by the time I got to 12 lines I thought I had more to say, and I resisted the form. I wrote it out. I let it go long; I let the lines rush past pentameter. And then I realized that I was overwriting and I was not telling the truth; I was hesitating. When I focused on the truth and compressed the lines (shedding the hesitations), darn it, there it was, a sonnet.

On reflection, the sonnet form may be working for these poems because they contain such difficult material for me, as I reconcile myself to the fact that my relationship with my father was nowhere near healthy, and that I am not mourning him in the expected ways. With a sonnet, the poet tries to capture* one crystal clear moment amongst the chaos, thus being more prone to lyric than narrative. This helps as lyric is my strength, and when I was getting overwhelmed today with what I was trying to say, I reminded myself to go back to where the poem began and just tell that one, small truth (the fact that I’m not devastated).

In truth, I’m feeling more exposed, more vulnerable & raw than I’ve felt in a long time when writing. As I drafted, I kept hearing that little voice say, “you can’t write that” and “you can’t publish this; it will hurt so-and-so and so-and-so.” I’m pretty sure this is what people mean when they say someone is writing “necessary” poems; I’m just not sure these poems will be necessary to anyone else but me.

*(and capture is the right word, as the sonnet provides the frame — the cage?)