The Poem Not Taken
Buried deep inside many written poems, an unwritten Ur poem still lives, obscured by the palimpsest of drafts that alter, avert, build upon, and ultimately transmute its original impulses. What rises to the top to be read is at best a resigned success, a good enough poem. That has been a fact of my writing life. I know enough to surrender to this necessary fatalism, bowing to the poem’s dictation of its own terms. Insist it into existence and it will die in your arms. But in one instance, my unwritten poem haunted me like an unsolved murder, a cold case in law enforcement reopened with new evidence, interrogating the forensics of my imagination. Who or what was the culprit?
In l990, six months pregnant with my son, my second child, I began to experience symptoms of an agitated depression, which worsened after his birth and continued until I began to see a therapist and to concede to medication. Like chalk on a blackboard, my sense of self was erased with a frightening and indifferent efficiency. Classic depersonalization. Friends and family rushed in to excuse my unfortunate state of mind. After all, wasn’t I the recipient of bad biological luck, hormonal haplessness, the baby blues? It happens. I wanted to believe them.
Once recovered, I could never write directly about the experience. Shame, of course, was an impediment as was the fear that if I told my son, it would harm him irrevocably, if he wasn’t damaged already, and disenchant him about my ability to mother him. But poetry was no help either. All of its dependable devices, the giddy deployment of metaphor, the hypnotic music, the arresting image, the ingenious syntax, ultimately led me to poems either falsely beautiful, or abstracted to the point of incomprehension. As well, the language of clinical depression, so brutely literal, or the cliches of mental illness, had no place in poetry. How do you scan pre-partum depression? Even more, casting the material as a narrative poem posed problems with lineation and rhythm, and veered perilously close to prose, verging on memoir, with its own demands as a genre, ones I was not particularly skilled in handling. So I gave up, Doris Day philosophical, “Que sera sera, whatever will be will be …”
Thirty years later, I have finally confessed the truth to my son, who, not really to my surprise, continues to love me. All well and good. But the big reveal also had to do with something else I had figured out. All along, the dogs of my due diligence had been barking up the wrong tree. I needed another genre entirely, the lyric essay. My new work-in-progress, while based on the subject of maternal depression, has extended its reach to include resources and to conduct research close to home, namely my son’s job at a company where he trials organic seeds. This capacious hybrid form generously accommodates my interests, no matter their seeming dissimilarities, whether it be facts about beneficial soil conditions for growing pumpkins, Native American, Sumerian and Greek myths, botany, the climate crisis, a comparison of the reproductive systems between plants and humans, Cinderella’s coach in the Disney movie, motherhood, and who knows what else. With this liberatory form I can be responsive to diverse ways of knowing, feeling, sensing, and engage in various rhetorical strategies, such as description, narration, exposition, and argument.
In arranging and juxtaposing contingent sections, I am finding many connections among seemingly disparate subject matters, ideas, emotions and experiences. What could be more different from each other in kind and in manner than breath from blood, than blood from nerves, than nerves from excrement? Yet each is part of a system necessarily interdependent, exquisitely synchronized for the body to operate as a whole organism. I hope this lyric essay in progress, once finished, will at last realize its ambitions, no longer the wannabe poem, but something else entirely, strange and wild and true, functioning within its own ecology of meanings and beating with a daring experimental heart.