The Forest for the Trees

I recently felt the need to explain myself. As the author of a piece, a poem, a profile of someone for a journalistic forum, an essay, even a journal entry, I have learned how to home in on particulars: the juice is in the details, we have often been instructed. Of course, this leaves so much out.

With poetry it is especially true. A poem is not the life that it may describe. As William Wordsworth defined poetry it is "emotion recollected in tranquility." There is a distillation in the art of creating a poem. For one single effort, much is cast to the side. A lot of young writers, and even those of us who write from the larger lot of words down to the finer choices (as compared to those who craft word by word, carefully over time, with full consciousness--whew, I don't know how they do it!), we have a lot of work to do to winnow and revise.

A poem is never the full story. The poem about the last moments in the hospital with my sister, as we sat with my mother as she was dying, does not describe the full arc of my relationship with my mother--hardly at all.

An acquaintance assumed that the relationship with my mother was beautiful and nurturing. At the moment of her death, there was beauty and even nurturing, in an odd spiritual way. But, my relationship with my mother was complicated, with me more often in the nurturing role.

Mary Webb, a wonderful writing teacher and novelist in Berkeley, California, taught students to discuss the work of others by focusing on the poem itself, or the story, and not the author. We were instucted to talk about how "the narrator seems to be motivated by . . . " or "the speaker in the poem is very . . ." rather than assume the narrator, speaker, voice behind the poem was the person sitting before us in the room.

A writer, even one so subjective and exposed as many poets can be, needs creative distance. The work has to be set aside from personality. In truth, long after the creator passes away, the work may still exist in tangible form, revealing its small truths or exposing the big lies. But it is never the life of the writer herself, never the forest, only a small, struggling and uniquely beautiful pine.

Putting Out

Tonight's an occasion for one of the few readings I do in a year. As the wife of a stage actor, I should have learned how to overcome stage-fright by this point, but I have not. The only way I can cope with the anxiety of reading my poems in front of an audience, even one filled with good friends, is to create a persona who is the performer. Let's call her Zoom Majestic. She is my Bette Midler role model, big, busty, boomy, unafraid of belting out a song or strutting her poet's swaggle. With Zoom to front for me, I can put these poems out there.

The poems I'm reading are all about work, my jobs in the past, jobs I've observed others doing, the nature of work itself. They are from a manuscript I'm completing called "Workers' Compensation: Poems of Labor and the Working Life," nothing fancy about that. It's Labor Day, appropriately enough.

I do this reading in honor of my mother, Deborah Elizabeth Shannon Dresser, who was sole-supporter of my family from the time I was about 12 years old. Mom worked night and day, a day-job in the insurance industry where she eventually rose to become a part-owner of the business but never profited from it they way her male colleagues did, and a nighttime career of doing freelance accounting and income tax work. My most familiar childhood memory of my mother was watching her back as she sat in a secretary chair at an old wooden desk, sharpening her stash of #2 Ticonderoga pencils and leaning over large black ledgers into the wee hours. She did it to keep the wolf from the door--the wolf who could huff and puff and blow our house down with little impunity. The wolf had many names: taxes, cost-of-living, utility bills, back-to-school clothing, groceries, a car that could get her to and from work. But, mostly the wolf was poverty panting and shaking his ratty fur as he circled continually in our front yard. Here's a poem I wrote just as my mother passed away.

FEATHERS
for my sister, Karyn
One by one we remove white feathers.
With each our mother’s head softens,
lowering to the floor of her pillow,
releasing its burden. We make separate
stacks--my sister and --piling them up
from the sand floor of an old cottage.
Two small ladders of feathers
drawn from a snowy goose rising
as the pillow flattens into the quiet
where my mother rests her head,
a pebble of gold that sinks
to the worn tucked sheet.

When she releases her last breath,
another feather swims from her round mouth.
The feathers my sister and I carefully placed
scatter to the corners of the early-morning room,
trace their contours across the walls,
seep as if liquid light through closed window blinds,
finally nudging the hospital door open--
that heavy green hospital door
we will never open again.
-- Jannie M. Dresser 6/18/09