One of the things I’ve been working on over the course of the last fifteen months is a series of poems that started when dad was dying. I am what I am: a writer. There is always a part of me that stands apart, and starts shaping words around whatever experience I’m having, or seeing or hearing about. So, the last day I spent with him, the day before he died, I was curled up in a huge recliner chair beside his bed in the special ward they’d set aside for him at George Town Hospital, with my notebook and a pen. Writing.
Mostly what I was doing was looking at him, and thinking about all the conversations and arguments and stormy looks and silent gestures we’d had with and past each other over the years. We had a … complicated relationship. He was not an easy person. And I am very much his daughter.
It was little things that hit me, that started me making notes. The texture of his skin. The shape of his face, of the bones of it, cheek and chin and nose. The machines around him, all the tubes and cords and rails and pillows and jugs and linens. Idiotic things, like his bad habits, or things that he hated or feared or avoided that were not harmful or frightening to anyone but him. How our relationship had changed, and would change. The sounds of his breathing, and how that was changing too.
So the idea for the sequence was born – a series of poems about dad, trying to deconstruct some of who he was, and what we had been to each other. Loosely inspired by the inimitable Selima Hill and her (now apparently impossible to get hold of) collection, Portrait of My Lover as a Horse. But this one would be Making an Exhibition of My Father, with each poem being titled Portrait of my father as a –––. Portrait of my father as a drag queen. Portrait of my father as Mister Punch. Portrait of my father as the Man in the Moon. Portrait of my father as a Tasmanian poppy field. PoMFa, for short. Some would be funny, some would be sad, some would be angry, some would be gentle. I made lots of notes.
And then he died. And after a while I came home.
The first piece actually started being written in my final class with my Hagley Writers Institute students last year. It was loosely based on a piece by Kay Ryan, called “Chop”, that a student had brought to talk about. Looking at my notes, I see that the challenge I set them afterwards was to describe something they’d seen recently; to be very particular and detailed, and to include one or two similes. And to then expand one of the similes, and let it ‘blossom into whimsy’. I’ll write about the piece that came out of that some other time (when I get it finished), and about the other poems that have come.
Writing these has been – and still is – damn hard. The poem that will end the PoMFa sequence keeps elbowing its way in, which means I have to gird up my loins and prepare to spend a couple of hours in floods of tears. I can’t find a way of being true to the moment and the experience without also putting myself in that emotional context – presumably there are other ways? someone? anyone? – so it’s not something I exactly relish doing. And there’s always the fear that the poem coming from it won’t be good enough. Not just the usual impostor-syndrome bullshit, but that the price I seem to have to pay – fully written-off days, red eyes and snotty nose and headaches from weeping – will be worth it.
(Side note: one of my students this year asked me how you go about writing poems about difficult things. Can’t remember what I said in response, but I‘m pretty sure it wasn’t that …)
The first completed poem in the sequence was one I wrote in response to Rattle magazine’s monthly Ekphrastic Challenge, back in January. I had brought the image to my students’ attention in a workshop, and then gone off and done other things. Then the poem I wanted to work on made me quite frustrated, so I turned back to the image and tried to see what I could do with it as a form of relief. (?!)
I ended up doing little bits of weird research in all directions – the history of jesters’ costumes; treatments for mouth cancer; medieval torture devices; what fungi actually does underground, and the difference between all the various bits of a fungus. And then I remembered Dad sending me the photo of the mask they made for his treatment, calling it his Count of Monte Christo mask. So I knew what to call the poem.
You can read the poem and see the image at Rattle – it won the competition for that month. (Yet again, an ekphrastic poem completed on January 31st)! It’s a fairly brutal poem, but weirdly I didn’t have any trouble recording it for them (yep, you can even hear it in my own voice). I did however have trouble reading it at CPC in the autumn. It was a couple of weeks after John Allison died, also of cancer, and I had this moment of imagining I could see John sitting in the front row (he wasn’t), and then imagined Dad instead, and the sadness I felt about both of them got twisted together and meant I only just made it through the poem. There were some big hugs afterwards. But it went over well, and I had a couple of people come up to me through the evening to say that it had spoken to them. Just as I’d had a couple of people reach out after it was published online. So I knew I’d done something right with it.
Writing can be a really damaging business. Putting words around emotion usually means dipping back into that emotion, even if only a little. You learn ways of managing it, and then it just comes down to how much you can tolerate, and whether the work you produce has survived the process. Bleeding onto a page isn’t art, so I’m always wary of poems which tap into deep grief or deep anger – I’m trying to make the poem the thing, not have it ride on the subject matter. It’s not enough to show you my wounds – yes you might feel sorry for me, but just shoving your wounds at people is icky and gross and manipulative. If I do my job right, the poem shows you your wounds, or something like enough to be worthwhile.
So now my task is to build up this sequence, which will be full of sadness and anger and bad things, but to include some of the good, to also allow it to be redemptive somehow. Maybe not hopeful – I’m an atheist; I don’t think my dad has gone to “a better place” – but somehow to try and do justice to … his death? His life? What this has all felt like? Something. So grief will be there. But humour too. The business of death is absurd, after all. Plus I don’t want people dismissing it as Daddy issues. Or for it to turn into some modern version of Young Werther …
The irony is that I know Dad didn’t ever read either of my books.
Serve him right when I put him in fishnet stockings.
(Don’t piss off poets. We have ways of making your image live on …)
A Dark Feathered Art 