Tag Archives: Poetry

A poetess in the family

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Ancestry is an intriguing area of study. Family is important, and many want to know where they came from. Look at the amount of people paying for DNA tests and for monthly Ancestry.com memberships so that they can access records and build a family tree of their forgotten, long dead ancestors. I’ve always been particularly interested in history, and I was one of the many spending money so that I could have a better understanding of the people I came from.

Some things you can’t discover by simply adding family members and census records to your family tree. Those are the things you find out when it’s possible to get your grandparents talking about their own families, those memories being the only thing remaining of them now.

One day I spoke with my sweet grandmother, the woman whom all classic grandmother stereotypes must be built off of, who despairs at fattening my skinny frame so I don’t look so hungry. I said something about wanting to pursue my writing career with a master’s program, and she brought up something startling.

“My aunt was a poet!”

“What?” How had I not known of this?

“Yes. She had two published books and everything. Boy, she was a character. It was like she lived in another world. She was so whimsical.”

How had I not known this?

Yet a quick Google search showed me my great-great-aunt’s poems in a collection of American poetry at Brown University Library. In light of my own literary aspirations, and those of my mother and sisters, I had this relative who felt the same way about words and stories that I did.

One more lovely thing about the Internet! But the reality of this story, the heart of it wasn’t in the foreign name connected to mine in a genealogical family tree on the Internet, it was hearing my grandmother say her voice, and get to know this whimsical, breathy woman through her stories.

Thanks for clearing the way Elillian Madeley, with your collections Full Moon and Thoughts gathered along the path of life. I will try to live up to the family legacy this fall in my MFA program!

Choice-A Rather Self-Important poem

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I am handed

A mango

Everyone around me has one

I glance at how they hold it

Tightly in their grasp

I squeeze

I peek

They cut into it

Knives that are set aside

I prepare to copy them, teeth set

They scoop it out

The flesh

Bright

Orange

Flesh

Stuck to it was the green peel

I peek about

Some try bites

They taste the green

It stains their teeth

They stop eating, the taste ruined

Others tear the peel away

Leaving wasted meat attached

I stare at mine

Unable to choose

Reading Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath left me with an image, but unlike the one she was describing, looking at the fig tree, I was standing over my sink trying to ascertain how to cut into a mango. Either way I would go about it, it would be difficult. Either decision I made, additional fruit would be wasted.  I was frozen, with such an inconsequential decision, on how I would go about it. Life isn’t just an arrangement of choices before you, but one decision at a time, difficult and still simple, with differences seemingly innocuous. What did it matter what city I lived in? Yet it could and should certainly affect who I marry, how my career develops, what graduate school I go to, what experiences I have that lead to writings, and if or how I become a published author.

This is all determined by a few choices that will happen early on, and it could all start with one. I stare at my choices, difficult as they are, because of the work involved, and what stakes they will lead to. And yet….it all starts with one choice.

Should I?

Poetry Explorations

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I never was very good at the whole poetry thing. That sounds complete inarticulate, but to be honest my talent was always in the emotion driving a plot, and the characters that felt real to others, that were imperfect beings, with no Mary Sues or Pollyannas (though I shamefully admit I loved her as a child). When it came to poetry however, my lack of a sense of rhythm carried over from dance and sounded awful, in my mind.

Last week I visited Dallas with the other new members of the AVID team at my school. I was excited to be attending this year’s AVID Summer Institute. I was given a thick book filled with group activities for my students next year, and an assignment to mimic a poem by Langston Hughes. I couldn’t mimic the poem well enough, if I’m trying to do something like someone else, it will not work. All I could do was base the poem on my own background in a way, twisting facts as needed for the mood that overtook me in my sleep deprived state. The only thing I managed to do was have their required like of ‘dear facilitator’. I wouldn’t have shared it, but I was happy with the dark ending and my table’s reaction, so here it is!

“Tell me about yourself; bleed your life on the page,

Use pretty words and seduce your reader so they will follow you for an age.”

You preach with your finger tsking lately, out with your dimple!

Easily done, my life dissected

Is anything so simple?

Youngest daughter of six, oft rejected,

Born to a loud home in the South.

Now twenty-two, enjoying a quiet life

Amid piles of books and wine down my mouth,

Too quiet, clock ticking and causing strife

Time spent waiting, waiting…for what?

Knocks filled with promise, husband, praise from readers-but!

I am impatient, stubborn, varied

I only wait so long my friend, to be carried

To the future, the future to which I belong

Where my dreams will come true, come strong

This is where you come in, dear facilitator,

My empty ticking classroom and life needs a rehabilitator.

Someone to answer the questions, why why why,

To let me live my dreamed life, and finally to die.”

Big group

I am the only one being fake candid-did I ruin the photo?