The Memoir:
The inspiration for the memoir was a car-ride through Williamston on a rainy day. I was in the backseat, and was watching the water accumulate and seemingly drown the small town. For the memoir, I expanded on that memory to place myself in that town looking out at the people passing by, and also imagining the people who might live there as well, dealing with this weather. I wanted a consistent idea that would prevail throughout the story, and I wanted that idea to be reflected in the style of the memoir.
In the revision process, I was mostly trying to hone down the voice and tone, and then also expanding upon the girl, following your suggestion. Much of the grammatical editing involved making the sentence structure better, especially by reducing run-on sentences and reducing comma usage. The 2-week-ago revision was my most dramatic, modifying many small parts and also elaborating on certain descriptions, like the girl.
The Poems:
"Untitled Pantoum" was the product of our observation of a stranger. The stranger was someone taking a test outside of the classroom, sitting in a desk that had been pulled into the hall. I decided on the pantoum form for the impacted ending where the lines are repeated. I also tried to use parallelism in my description of him in the lines. It really turned out better than I expected.
"Cope" is a poem inspired from an activity in Poetry Club where we each receive a "type" of person (occupation, personality type, etc) and a location or situation. I received a stock broker in an AA meeting. While many poems of this activity turn out to be humerous, I decided to take a serious turn, and ask what would have led up to this situation. When I finished the first draft of just getting certain ideas and phrases onto paper, I re-read it and found a trend, that I had started and ended a couple stanzas in the same way. So I decided to make each stanza parallel and structered at the beginning, and let that structure degrade as he sank lower, and then return to structure at the end, to give way for a little hope.
"Orange" was the result of having that orange before me in class. When I first wrote the poem it was much more broken and fragmented, which I first was aiming for. Looking back on it later though, I wanted to convey the room and the time period that I saw in my head. I also wanted to expand the description of the orange. I had liked the idea of it being so fragmented, almost as if the situation is portrayed from the orange's point of view, or as events related to this insignificant object, but the orange in my revision seemed to take on a more significant role for the narrator.
"A Holiday Story" was also written at Poetry Club. We each were given an inspiration; mine was Christmas. My first attempt at a poem fell very flat, but was a lot more upbeat than this one. This poem was also party inspired by the Rage Against the Machine lyrics "born of a broken man, but not a broken man."
Sunday, March 4, 2007
"A Holiday Story"
The son of a Broken Man
Is a Broken Man
That Woman cooked each day
Her ruddy red face burned by the fire and the hand
Of That Man, drunk in the armchair, hung unconsciously by midafternoon
And That Girl never got in home by three
Whoring in beds with a needle in her arm
And that boy sat beneath a dying tree
that couldn't even hold the weight
Of Bud Light cans
Drooping melancholily over a newspaper-wrapped box
that boy who listened to the out-of-breath woman
Try to say a few words of salvation over his head
At the fold-out table
That lodged itself in the middle of the trailer
For special occasions
that boy who felt the love of his father
Through mingled slips of hands and slips of tongue
that boy who watched the trail of his sister
Slip from her pillow on the sofa
To That Neighbor
To That Dealer
And to That Jail
that boy, he grew up into another man
One who sat alone in front of a tree
That didn't droop under any weight at all
For it sat bare
Its pine didnt fall onto any wrapped box
For it wasn't there
That man didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't sleep
That man had a life outside of stifling Alabama air
That man couldn't not show the side
That his father showed him
This new man sat alone in blinking silent lights
With reruns on basic cable
Not seeing the glistening purity of the white outside
And the New York celebration of this eve
But seeing the Alabama trailer
And so many other trailers and homes
That burned from the inside out
That burned with no fire of redemption
This, our man, he spends Christmas here
In an empty apartment
With an empty life
With an empty soul
For the son of a Broken Man
Is a Broken Man.
Is a Broken Man
That Woman cooked each day
Her ruddy red face burned by the fire and the hand
Of That Man, drunk in the armchair, hung unconsciously by midafternoon
And That Girl never got in home by three
Whoring in beds with a needle in her arm
And that boy sat beneath a dying tree
that couldn't even hold the weight
Of Bud Light cans
Drooping melancholily over a newspaper-wrapped box
that boy who listened to the out-of-breath woman
Try to say a few words of salvation over his head
At the fold-out table
That lodged itself in the middle of the trailer
For special occasions
that boy who felt the love of his father
Through mingled slips of hands and slips of tongue
that boy who watched the trail of his sister
Slip from her pillow on the sofa
To That Neighbor
To That Dealer
And to That Jail
that boy, he grew up into another man
One who sat alone in front of a tree
That didn't droop under any weight at all
For it sat bare
Its pine didnt fall onto any wrapped box
For it wasn't there
That man didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't sleep
That man had a life outside of stifling Alabama air
That man couldn't not show the side
That his father showed him
This new man sat alone in blinking silent lights
With reruns on basic cable
Not seeing the glistening purity of the white outside
And the New York celebration of this eve
But seeing the Alabama trailer
And so many other trailers and homes
That burned from the inside out
That burned with no fire of redemption
This, our man, he spends Christmas here
In an empty apartment
With an empty life
With an empty soul
For the son of a Broken Man
Is a Broken Man.
Orange
Orange, cold and solid and soft
The tender peel around it
His mouth opened, his throat cleared
I rolled the orange in my hand
The corset was choking, his jacket immaculate
And the sun made the air musty and stifling
He shifted his weight
The orange lay in my lap
The dust settled on the antiques
And the grandfather clock ticked away
The silence between us
He gripped his hat
And started to say
The orange fell from my lap
And rolled across the Persian rugs
I wilted in the high backed chair
As he gave a short bow and turned
The orange sat in a ray of sun
Across the floor from me.
The tender peel around it
His mouth opened, his throat cleared
I rolled the orange in my hand
The corset was choking, his jacket immaculate
And the sun made the air musty and stifling
He shifted his weight
The orange lay in my lap
The dust settled on the antiques
And the grandfather clock ticked away
The silence between us
He gripped his hat
And started to say
The orange fell from my lap
And rolled across the Persian rugs
I wilted in the high backed chair
As he gave a short bow and turned
The orange sat in a ray of sun
Across the floor from me.
Friday, March 2, 2007
"Cope"
It's not an ability to cope
When all he deals with is absolutes,
Numbers on papers and trends and facts,
The change is a change on national level;
He doesn't have to cope.
He didn't have to cope when she got sick,
Frail in a lily-white room
With machines pumping life through tubes,
The girl he saw grow reduced to a picture;
He didn't have to cope.
He didn't cope when the wall grew,
The partition between love and law,
As she became more distant
And more of a ghost even than he;
He didn't have to cope.
Instead he found life by day
In pages of numbers and
Flashing streams of light on Wall Street,
In function and reason, cause and reaction-
Life in a neat and ordered world.
And then he found life at night
At the bottom of a bottle,
Liquid relief that burned and soothed
That made things bearable, or so he claimed,
LIfe in the dark-lit streets under neon lights.
He leaned back in the plastic chair
Stiff and uncomfortable, made for grade-school kids
He certainly didn't fit
He was not some victim needing a 12-step program
With terms like "strength" and "willpower" and
-Shudder- "forgiveness"
He was a man in control
An upright man that didn't cope
Instead, things coped to him
This wasn't his place; these people were fools
He was doing nothing wrong
Words like addiction and problem
Didn't describe him
This wasn't his world, wasn't his life
And yet...
And yet he sat there listening.
He had found a way to the downtown office,
In the basement of the church,
Listening to these men prattle on;
Yet he sat there, listening.
When all he deals with is absolutes,
Numbers on papers and trends and facts,
The change is a change on national level;
He doesn't have to cope.
He didn't have to cope when she got sick,
Frail in a lily-white room
With machines pumping life through tubes,
The girl he saw grow reduced to a picture;
He didn't have to cope.
He didn't cope when the wall grew,
The partition between love and law,
As she became more distant
And more of a ghost even than he;
He didn't have to cope.
Instead he found life by day
In pages of numbers and
Flashing streams of light on Wall Street,
In function and reason, cause and reaction-
Life in a neat and ordered world.
And then he found life at night
At the bottom of a bottle,
Liquid relief that burned and soothed
That made things bearable, or so he claimed,
LIfe in the dark-lit streets under neon lights.
He leaned back in the plastic chair
Stiff and uncomfortable, made for grade-school kids
He certainly didn't fit
He was not some victim needing a 12-step program
With terms like "strength" and "willpower" and
-Shudder- "forgiveness"
He was a man in control
An upright man that didn't cope
Instead, things coped to him
This wasn't his place; these people were fools
He was doing nothing wrong
Words like addiction and problem
Didn't describe him
This wasn't his world, wasn't his life
And yet...
And yet he sat there listening.
He had found a way to the downtown office,
In the basement of the church,
Listening to these men prattle on;
Yet he sat there, listening.
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