Writing This Poetry

Window – Cape Spear NFLD

 

My second book of poems, Other Living Things, has just been published by Black Moss Press – five years after my first.  Now in those five years I have also devoted a lot of time to being a parent and English/creative writing teacher.  I’m also learning to play the cello, love to read, own a home, etc.  Still I’ve been asked why it’s taken so long.

 

Time is part of it, but the truth is this set of poems were tough to write.  They deal with the unhappy things that happen to us (primarily in childhood) that won’t go away, but keep pushing their dim, dusty way into our lives – even forty or so years later.  Though we push them away, laugh at them, even deny them, they will not die. 

 

I think some people respond by resolving, learning from, and for the most part, moving on with their lives.  I don’t believe for a minute that’s easy to do.  There’s a lot of depression, anger, passive-aggressive behaviour out there that I think is rooted in these old hurts.

 

I’ve been interested in writing about these for some time.  It’s been difficult though.  I’ve avoided writing many of the poems in the book, convincing myself they could not be written, that I couldn’t write about them.  Why?  It’s hard to say.  In some cases, I just didn’t want to put the stuff on paper.  I went through a process too.  There are a whole series of poems I wrote at the start of this that never made it into the book.  I wrote these from the point of view of  a teenager finally standing up for herself and breaking free of all those limiting experiences.  They came out sounding angry and accusatory – not what I was going after in the book.  Maybe they had a cathartic effect for me.  Likely they did.

 

I draw on a lot of sources for my subject matter.  Sure, some are my own experiences, but many are not.  And I always use poetic licence – I twist and turn events, mixing fact and fiction until even I’m convince the whole thing is true.  I think that’s what many writers do.

 

Another challenge to writing these poems was that I’m essentially a private person and didn’t want people saying, “Did that really happen to you.”  I understand people’s fascination with such things but there’s a line I couldn’t cross.   I was actually asked this question at a writing salon that I attend.  I went home and wrote this poem, which does appear in the book.  Originally it was one poem, but the last stanza became the preface to the book and the first stanza was left to stand on its own with the title, “The Problem with Pity.”

 

Here’s the preface:

 

You ask, do I write about me and I tell you
I write about what matters to me, what I have done,
what has been done to me, what I have seen done to others,
what I imagine has been done to you.
I craft lines, yours now.
Take, chew, swallow what nourishment
you can, or spit them out.
They are as much about you as they are about me.

 

“The Problem with Pity” appears on page 54.

 

The Problem with Pity

 

Taking a detail out of a poem you ask,
did it really happen like this? to you?
a question that takes these words
off the page, out of your world, and moves
them to a place where you need feel nothing
more than pity.  The work undone, I fall from artist
to blathering victim or monstrous perpetrator.
The words become a news item full of pathos,
my bloody photograph and the headline
Woman survives attack of ten-foot tall chicken
or me, one of Jerry Springer’s guests
donning my double head, or sixth toe, or tail.

 

The poems in the book deal with all manner of hurts: humiliation, helplessness, sexual or physical pain, taunting – things that we’ve all experienced, witnessed, or read about on the front pages of newspapers at some point in our lives.  

 

There are also a number of poems that express the fears of a parent who knows what “some people would do” to children.

 

This is my first ever blog posting.  I welcome your thoughts.

 

Other Living Things by Carlinda D'Alimonte

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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