From Memoir to Lyric

As I have been sharing in previous blog posts, I have started writing poetry again within the past two months. It feels fairly accurate if over-dramatic to say that poetry has been pouring out of me. And while it's hard to judge one's own work I think it's good -- or at least not bad, even if it probably needs more revision than I am aware of without workshopping.

Most immediately crafting poems feel absolutely wonderful, like better-than-anything-else-I-can-think-of wonderful, and it makes me amazed that I lost or gave it up for so long. The satisfactions of academic writing have been only the palest echo of this pleasure.

But what is happening is also confounding in ways: I wanted to be writing creative nonfiction, which lots of people read now, not poetry, which mostly only other poetry types read, and my desire has truly been to communicate about my life and perceptions to a potentially wider audience. I don't want to give up one overly limited readership (people who actually read literary scholarship) only to tie myself to another. And I wanted to be writing something solid, a book.

I haven't given up writing prose -- I am actively working on creating some shorter pieces out of what I've been drafting -- but I am also trying to attend to my authentic creative impulses, since that was the whole point in the first place. I struggle with some frustration over my writing plan having derailed, but then try to accept that a plan is one thing but what I am really engaged in is a deep journey, something that cannot be mapped in advance. My therapist keeps telling me that, and I hang on to it.

The two forms aren't separate, of course. Leaving aside any abstract literary reflections on their relationship (I'm sure they're out there, but I haven't looked for them so far), here are some thoughts I've been having recently:

• Working on the memoir/Mary Dyer project, I wrote my way into regaining a sense of my voice, and that voice gravitates towards poetry. And I recognize that the passages in the project where I was writing most lyrically felt the most alive to me. I write so much out of rhythm and sound, always. The parts that were more narrative/expository always felt a bit heavy and dull.

• Working on the project, I wrote deeply into key emotional areas of my past. I wrote the images that resonate for me. Some how that woke me up, reconnected me to my authentic self. And that self was a serious poet once, and seems to be announcing that she wants to be one again. I feel like I need to listen to her. And none of the writing I did is wasted: it just might turn into something else. 

• Many of my poems (now and earlier in my life) have an element of memoir -- they are about my past, as intertwined with the present. I don't consciously want to write autobiographical or confessional poetry (although, admittedly, I read it avidly from others), but I am also not especially drawn to poetry that is too abstract, divorced from recognizable lived experience -- just as, I realize, I am also now choosing to reject the disembodied quality of literary/cultural/gender theory. So I am still doing memoir, I see, just in a different way. 

• My relation to memory lends itself better to poetry than memoir: what stays with me are emotions, shards of scenes, resonant images, things that can be put together and built out through imagination in a lyric way. "These fragments have I shored against my ruins." I do not tend to remember larger scenes (what happened sequentially, who said what, what the setting was fully like, etc.), and I feel numb and blocked at the idea of recreating them imaginatively. When I read normal memoir and step back to think about the craft of it, the novelistic detail writers are able to recall or fabricate so that it sounds recalled amazes me. For better or worse I don't have that talent. I was never going to write a traditional memoir; I knew I couldn't.

I wrote a new poem yesterday that is the most complex one that has come since I re-started this. Although it is grounded in the present and recent past (a short visit to the Adirondacks a few weeks ago, echoing one last summer), it dives back into past memories I wrote about as part of the project this winter while I was in Mexico, excavating my emotional/relational life. With the associative freedom of lyric, I pulled in other things as well -- past and present juxtaposed in the historical/political realm. (My Dyer project was very much about that too.) I'm putting it in below.

Here is one image (not mine) of Fort Crown Point, the immediate setting of the poem below. The historic site is a much more expansive area with more structures than this limited view suggests. It is not far from Fort Ticonderoga, but in some ways more compelling because so untouched. Very Tintern Abbey -- I felt like I was in Britain or Europe more than in New York.

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[poem taken down during submission for publication]

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And one more photo, from the actual experience: my Cocoa (DC Chocolatedrop) and her famous daddy Cracker (Flupascrackerbox) in 2017.