I just found these old notes on my hard drive while looking for something else. They must have been something I started doing for a class at some time. I seem to have been following the genesis and development of a particularly slippery poem. The notes were apparently originally handwritten, and then transcribed over. I have no idea how much time went by between one and the next. I'm guessing that the lines of poetry and the metrical notations were the handwritten notes, and the exigeses came when I typed them all up.
FIRST PAGE OF NOTES
I was thinking of writing a ghazal,
and since I’ve been thinking a lot about a possible connection between ghazal and blues, I began
with
the blues
and then tried to fit a couple of
lines to it
The
first crack of light in the morning was the blues
When
all shadows were shadow, that was the blues
and at the same time, I written a
phrase I liked the sound of
striped
like snakes
and I started thinking of light –
morning light, maybe morning light across a bed, striped like a snake, and the
next line I tried was this:
She
woke up in the morning with her arms around the blues
The
morning light lay like a striped
SECOND PAGE
that seems to be as far as I got
with that thought. I was in the process of deciding I didn’t want to use
“blues” as the monorhyme end word in a ghazal. The next couplet I tried was
(brackets around works that were crossed out):
Morning
[began] started like a [striped] snake across her bed;
When
all shadows were shadow, the dark was her bed.
So I’d gotten rid of two things I
really thought I wanted to work with, the blues and “striped snake.”
The next thing I was going to get
rid of was the ghazal. It wasn’t working for me; I didn’t feel it. But I still
liked the formal regularity of the line, and I knew that the lines and rhythms
I was hearing were formal. I decided to try a villanelle.
Day slipped like a snake across her bed.
When the shadows clustered into shadow
She pulled the darkness up around her head.
Then, on the back of the page, a
bunch of scattered notes. I was trying to find rhythms that I liked.
-
/ - /
- / -
/ - /
day slithered like a snake across her bed
/
- / -
/ - / -
/
Day
slipped like a snake across her bed.
/
- / -
/ - /
-
Shadows
clustered into shadow
and a bunch of possible rhyme words
for the B rhyme:
shadow
meadow
arrow
tallow
and under the list of rhyme words, another
line:
hair
like snakeskin stretched across her bed
which seems to mean I was moving
away from the snake-as-sunbeam image, and this is maybe an example of letting a
fine isolated verisimilitude go by. I
think snake-as-sunbeam may well be a pretty good image. But I was allowing
myself not to be locked into it, to look around for other possibilities.
So here’s what fills up the rest of
this page:
Like
a snake she’d let into her bed
which I guess I hated. I hate it
now, looking at it. The metric pattern forces the line to sound stilted and
awkward – “LIKE a SNAKE she’d LET inTO her BED” - which puts that horrible, ugly stress on TO.
So under it, I have a note for the stress I want:
/ -
into bed (DA – duh INto BED)
and under that, a line that fits the
meter:
Like
a snake she’d followed into bed
which I also liked better as a plot
line, but I seem to have abandoned it. I go on to try a couple of other lines,
using one of the “B” rhyme words. I didn’t have the whole lines, just this
much:
- /
- / pretended she was dead
/ -
/ - , made her skin like tallow
and then filling out the lines
(indicating words crossed out, words stuck in, and in the third line, a
stressed syllable that had to go in, but I didn’t have yet):
For
two days, she pretended she was dead,
felt
[made]
her arms ^ like clay, [her] breasts like
tallow,
Hair
[hung] like snakeskin / across her bed.
Then, on the back of the page, a
couple of lines that don’t seem to be going anywhere, and I think I knew they
weren’t going anywhere:
When
she was seventeen and newly wed,
What men were
/ - pierced her like an arrow
PAGE THREE
By now, I had the beginnings of a
poem:
The day slipped like a snake across her bed,
And when the shadows clustered into shadow,
She pulled the darkness up around her head.
They challenged her to prove she wasn’t dead.
She showed her arms like clay, her breasts like tallow,
Her skin shed like a snake’s across her bed.
And it was working pretty well.
Except I didn’t like it. I liked the image of breasts like tallow, but “arms
like clay” didn’t do much for me. It seemed to be just there for the meter, to
fill out the line. “They challenged her to prove she wasn’t dead” seemed like a
nice line. It was metrically regular. It said something interesting. Why didn’t
I like it?
Looking at it again now, I do kinda
like it, and I like the formal poem that’s starting to take shape. But at that
point – and I hope my instincts were right – I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t
like the form, and I really didn’t like the meter. I wanted to break free of
it...into free verse, as a matter of fact. I guess that’s why they call it free
verse.
PAGE FOUR
So I changed “wasn’t dead” to “was
alive,” and I broke it into two lines, to shake myself loose from the metric
regularity:
To show them she was
alive, she wriggled free from
her skin, like a snake, and now
her new breasts were soft, like tallow,
So I’d completely and finally abandoned
the snake-as-sunlight image. Too bad, maybe. Or OK, maybe. Anyway, I needed to
start stripping things down. I knew I liked the image of breasts like tallow to
suggest a new, moist, not-quite-formed body emerging from the shed outer layer
of skin. Here’s the next start:
To prove to all three of them she was
alive, she shrugged free from
her skin, like a snake, and when
she turned around, her new breasts
were soft, like tallow,
[and her hands]
[and] her hair was downy, and white like milkweed,
and she blinked in the light.
But she was fast, she had
pads of air under her feet.
[and] She could move in any direction,
she could spin and dance like a leaf.
I tried out the “three of them” to
see if they’d open up an interesting plot line, but they didn’t, so I let them
go. This was pretty much the last hand-written draft.
That's the end of the notes I have in this file. If there were more intermediate steps, I don't remember them. But here's the finished poem.
PROOF
They asked her to prove she was real,
so she shrugged out of
her skin like a snake, and when she
turned around, her new breasts
were soft, like tallow,
her hair was white like milkweed,
and she blinked in the light.
But she was sudden, she had
pads of air under her feet.
She could move in any direction.
She could flip and scoot like a leaf.
She turned into shadow with the shadows.
