Hello again, Mistress Dyer

So, in an interesting turn of the wheel, I have just started writing poems about Mary Dyer. Seems inevitable, doesn't it? The immediate trigger was the weekend poetry workshop on Obsession I've signed up for later in June. We have to choose our obsession in advance and do some preparatory writing about it, and bring a poem we've written on it for distribution. There are other pieces of my life I feel more truly obsessed by than Dyer, but I discovered in the memoir workshop how their deeply interior quality and limited image-set could pose problems for extended writing. Dyer, I realized, will work better, because there is so much I want to reflect on with her but she is outside me and summons so many concrete referents to draw on.

The draft of the first Dyer poem I wrote, "May-shine" (which I assume is the one I'll copy for the workshop) jumped off from my own experience. I don't know that it's finished yet but I'm excited about its layers, and how writing it took me to an end I didn't plan out. But then I wrote another, and decided to do it as a persona poem, to see what happened if I took on her voice. And wow, it flowed and I enjoyed it.

Covent Garden. Much later than ca. 1620 when the memory is set, 

but I was looking for an evocative visual of a crowded market.

[poems taken down during submission for publication]

This offers a reading of the "primal scene" I endlessly come back to in my writing, when Mary Dyer followed Anne Hutchinson out of the church as Hutchinson left after being excommunicated, and how this drew public attention to Dyer and her monstrous birth.

But the childhood memory here is entirely fictional in origin. Frustratingly (or not), we know virtually nothing about Mary Barrett's childhood and family; she didn't even necessarily grow up in London although it is likely enough, since she was a young woman there. Good circumstantial evidence (the fact that she was literate and had excellent handwriting, a trace of an elaborate embroidered silk dress and, yes, a gold bodkin believed to have belonged to her that have survived) suggests she came from a very well-off family. Well, actually, the memory is my own, transposed to a market scene: once in a bus someone spoke rudely to my mother and and despite my shyness I whipped around in my seat and denounced him vehemently for daring to speak to her that way, and wanted to rip his eyeballs out.

I feel a bit guilty about how much I enjoyed doing this! I wrote a blog post early on about my ambivalent relationship to historical fiction, how people making things up makes me cringe. But I've gone and done exactly that, and it was so much fun, felt so freeing, I can tell I'm going to do more. Go figure. Maybe poetry, which is clearly an artifice, makes it less offensive? Readers are less likely to fall into thinking they are reading something historically factual.

What I really sense writing poems in Dyer's voice might offer me is not so much the freedom to render her experience imaginatively, but to use her to talk about pieces of my own experience in a distanced way, without being endlessly autobiographical regarding my less-than-exciting outer life. She offers an intense story through which to express intense feelings and internal perceptions, and to try out ways of speaking that I could not use myself. I'm going to keep going (not planning to write only Dyer poems, but to write as many of them as I want). Maybe the book I thought I was writing will be partly replaced by a suite of poems, as well as one or more lyric essays.

I am grateful to my friend Laura Helper-Ferris for her feedback on these drafts!


P.S.:  A question for any early modern people or language experts who might read this: formal "you" and familiar "thee." In this poem, Mary and her mother are of a higher class than the imaginary trader. Am I thinking correctly that Mary would say "thee" to the trader in her childhood memory, even though she is a child and he is an adult? (I do want to emphasize her sense of superiority; the fact that she grew up with considerable privilege is an important strand in all my thinking about her, and where she got her confidence from.) And would the trader say "you" to her mother, even though he was insulting her? (I am trying to get at a degree of class resentment here.)  And would it be "how durst thee" or "how durst thou" -- isn't what I have like later Quaker speech more than correct 17th-century English? As a Quaker Mary would have "thee'd" everyone, but that's not relevant to her earlier life. You'd think I'd know this, but the social nuances don't really come up in the early stuff I read, or I wasn't paying attention to this question when I did, and Quaker plain speech sounds correct to me so it's confusing.

I just realized today's date, June 1. June 1, 1660, was the date of Mary Dyer's execution. The poem "May-shine" that I linked above is partly about the last weeks of May that led up to that; looking at the northeastern landscape in May as I thought about that time so long ago, and how it resonates.