The Forms Memories Take

Memories are not always clear and linear. I know many of my own memories can be hazy, nebulous, and somehow all the while vivid and crisp—surreal, even. Interestingly enough, these strange recollections are the ones I turn over the most, as if the very fact that these seemingly insignificant details have transformed into colorful memories that have stuck with me all this time must mean there is a profundity in them that deserves examining.  I do most of this scrutinizing in my writing. Perhaps my favorite aspect of writing is the flexibility through which I can choose to express and explore (and at times dissect) my psychological ties to the images and sensory detail from my memory.

As a writer who has dabbled in both creative nonfiction and poetry, I could say there is a method to the way that I choose whether I’d like to convey these kinds of memories in an essay or a poem. Would I rather bare my soul in paragraphs or stanzas? Sentences or lines? And then from there, how can I be clever with my structure, how can I lead my form to follow function?  The truth is there is no real answer I can give, no way I can adequately clarify how I make certain distinctions.  What I can say is this: either way, writers will have to go with their gut.  For me, if the memory I want to convey in my writing is something that is specific and can be arranged chronologically, I might turn to an essay format (though admittedly, I particularly enjoy writing lyrical essays which may utilize a poetic device or two.)  Even in essay format, I find it difficult not to incorporate lyricism when unpacking a memory, but then again, for me, nostalgia has always been hard to deliver without a song. For my more bizarre, dreamlike memories, I turn to poem format much more often.

My poetry, not unlike my other writing, is usually approached with a degree of emotional distance rather than erring on the side of confessional.  When describing or conveying a memory in my poetry, I think this distance allows me a kind of dexterity, an ability to manipulate form and language to illustrate the stranger details of a memory—for instance, a peculiar scent that recalls candy, flowers, plums, and rubber from when I was five years old, the one that would make me ache with the absence of fancy-free youth if I smelled it now. Something about the brevity, and concurrently the great depth, of such a memory certainly lends itself to poetry, which in some ways seems to perfectly serve this type of memory in its own format—brief and insightful.  Phrases that sound like the taste of my grandmother’s spaghetti on Easter weekend, words that feel as toasty as the fireplace in my childhood home—sometimes only the musicality of language in poetry can express that flash of emotion and color buried in my mind’s eye.

Maddy García is a first-year poetry MFA Candidate and instructor of English composition at FAU. Much of her work grapples with identity, ambiguity of form, and the human experience juxtaposed against the cosmos. She is also a visual artist and, in her free time, she enjoys cooking and surrounding herself with cats.

A Matter of Focus: Thoughts on Craft in Poetry

When A Thing happens, when I feel a poem begin, I feel it as the base of my brain stem humming. It happens when I notice river-water curling around the legs of a motionless heron on the opposite bank. It also happens when I feel the weighty comparison of petty bickering on the Food Network contrasted with a multi-car pileup, the burned-out wreckage alongside my commute. 

It happened when I went to church and it happened when I saw my bare feet framed by stars through my best friend’s windshield way past curfew. I feel the same sensation when I begin a nonfiction piece, or the beginnings of inspiration related to an academic paper, but with a poem it’s different. Less puzzled, more exultant. Less in the front of my brain, more in the back where my molars are anchored, where I hold tension, where tension holds me.

Do I notice the times I describe above, these generative moments, easily? Do I record them? My body certainly records them, my sense of living anxiety as good as a notepad for taking ideas. Not that I don’t use my journal (or even the Notes app of my iPhone) to jot down phrases that sound pretty or stir my sensibilities. 

But more often, it’s common for me to feel the poem in my chest and my stomach before my mind can articulate the words that my guts seem to be singing. When this happens, it’s best for me to get to some paper, pen, and some silence so the poem can emerge, mostly whole, as quickly as possible. Often, this visceral response to a situation is so broad and feels so specific (a macrocosm and microcosm all at once) that my main decision in terms of craft is to appropriately focus the lens of my perception. My poems, painted in large swaths, are unwieldy, licking at the seams of cells with the same fervor that they attempt to use in devouring the stars. 

To rein in my poem, I focus on pulling that abundant response to the world back to what I can ostensibly know about my environment, my body, my immediate surroundings. This might mean using my senses only: what can I touch with my skin? What type of dirt is stuck under my fingernails right this second, and where did it come from? What is it about this particular Marlboro that tastes differently, and what does it taste of?

When that exploration of detail becomes mundane, or indistinguishable from the experiences of anyone else digging in the same field or smoking the same brand of cigarette, then I begin to explore the broader questions (at the risk of challenging my earlier, established focus). Why did that dirt cause me remember the farm I took my first job at, my grandmother who tended those fields, my grandfather who faithfully ran the tilling machines? Where did the smoke of the cigarette go that enchanted me to follow it? 

It’s in this connection between the stimulus and what memory was stimulated that I find the poem. It is the attempt to feel a chill and write, while shivering, what it means to be cold before I am warm again. My decision of craft is less a carefully measured editing or author’s mechanism and more a dreamer’s earnest attempt to explain the dream, to grasp at it with language before it fades from the body upon waking. Eileen Winn is a first year MFA student with a concentration in poetry and an interest in nonfiction. Originally from Ohio, Eileen lives in Florida with their husband and their cat. Without purple pens, much of their work would not exist.

Good Poets and Mystery Muses

Like all good poets, I have a notebook, in which the greater portion of used pages contain the unfinished. One-liners that hang from the top of otherwise vacant pages are in the majority, followed by varying lengths of fragmentary poems at different stages of development. Some of these are hopeless causes that no longer receive consideration. But there are a few that have become noteworthy thorns in my side. These will not rest or give me rest until they are complete.

One of these restless poems is of a man I saw only once. I saw him while parked at a Loves gas station in a smaller than usual rural Oklahoma town, and immediately he became a poem in the making. He was one of my firsts, the first subject outside my familiar realm of existence, my first attempt at characterizing someone I knew nothing about. He puzzled me, and I knew instantly that he would continue to do so until I had done him justice. But what type of poem was he to be? And what do I say about a man I don’t know? For days and weeks following my sighting I carried this man around in my memory until fear of him fading without me permanently sketching his portrait forced my hand. So strong was the need to pin him down and figure him out that he consumed my days and commandeered my nights. But the question remained: What do I say about a man I do not know? I started with what I saw:

                                                He rested his bike and his back

against the wall, a pattern of

bricks, beneath

a sprawling sign that read:

Love’s Country Store.

Thus, I began what would prove to be one of the most testing pieces I have ever written. I knew what I saw and could easily describe the physical, the tangible. But I sensed more than I saw that evening. I sensed something that was not concrete, something I couldn’t easily pin to the page of a notebook. This detective-like gut feeling was as real as what I saw, only less visible. How do I convey what I saw and sensed? Both seemed equally important to the process of bringing this man to life on paper. I fiddled with the idea of fictionalizing him. Writers do it all the time, right? I mean, who would know? I would know, I conceded. It would be an injustice. I couldn’t. Like the Psalmist, I lamented, it is too high, I cannot attain to it.

So, I settled with what I wanted to know about him:

                                                I watched him with a longing to know

his thoughts, wanting to hear the

winding turns of his narrative…

He, my mystery muse, still haunts my thoughts. His unfinished poem awaits closure. And like all good poets who know that some poems cannot be rushed or forced into compliance, I hold his memory and wait for time to loosen the scales, hopeful that as they fall the hidden will be revealed and the man in my memory will be justly rendered.

                                                ... I searched

his face for a sign, a furrowing of the brows,

a subtle twitch of facial muscle,

evidence of life inside his dejected body.

But he was transfixed in his thoughts,

suspended in a state of delicate quandary,

a space more satisfying than the view

of trashcans and stained pavement.

Corrine is currently a first year MFA student at Florida Atlantic University. She is an international student from Jamaica who suffers from persistent homesickness.