Where Childhood Ends and Song Begins
Lost in the Lost and Found includes a few poems written later than what some readers might ordinarily consider youth. At the same time, it does not include the stories I wrote as a child, the short stories I wrote at sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen, or the story I wrote in the fourth grade that was lost but still remains in my memory. Determining where childhood ends is not as simple as assigning an age. At eighteen, I certainly would not have considered myself a child. I was already with child and became a mother at nineteen. By twenty-one, I was a homeowner and an employee. By twenty-two, I was a wife and the mother of two children. I carried adult responsibilities and believed that carrying them made me an adult. Looking back now, however, I can still see the child in the person I was at twenty. Perhaps the drinking age had a point.
My poetry began to change with motherhood and continued changing throughout my early twenties, but the change had less to do with age than with the necessities of my life. I was constantly working, caring for infants, helping my husband rebuild a home that was more than a hundred years old, and desperately trying to learn all the responsibilities that had arrived faster than I felt prepared to meet them. I wanted to be the best mother, employee, homeowner, partner, and person I could be. At the same time, I lived with the painful realization that I was failing miserably at all of them.
Yet I still possessed the spirit to write. What I no longer possessed was time. So I began to sing. As I worked, I composed poetry in my mind and gave the words melodies. I sang each new song repeatedly so I would not forget it before I could reach a scrap of paper and write it down. The repetition became a form of preservation. Melody carried the words when my hands were occupied, rhythm helped hold the lines together, and rhyme gave memory something to follow. Without consciously setting out to do so, I had developed a method of oral composition. Instead of beginning with words written on a page, I created through voice, sound, cadence, and repetition in order to memorize and preserve them. Some I lost but those that I preserved I sing to this day.
Although I continued to write poetry during the little spare time I had, most of my creative work during the first half of my twenties took this form of song. I wrote songs to sing to my children at night, using gentle rhythms, repeated phrases, and soothing sounds much like lullabies. I wrote folk songs about the way I experienced life, my small town, the fall wind, the shanandoa cavers, often combining personal storytelling with rhyme, recurring ideas, and memorable melodies. I wrote funny songs because humor offered relief from the seriousness and exhaustion of daily responsibilities. I wrote love songs for my husband, using the direct emotional expression and personal address common to lyric poetry.
I also wrote many spiritual songs and poems during those years. Some took the form of psalms. They were expressions of prayer, praise, longing, questioning, gratitude, sorrow, and faith. In them, I often spoke directly to God. The poems became conversations as much as declarations, and spiritual reflection became inseparable from poetry. Repetition, parallel thoughts, appeals, questions, and recurring images gave many of these works a psalm-like quality even when I was not consciously analyzing the techniques I was using.
During this same period, I began writing Celestial Conversations. The work took nearly the entire decade to develop. Unlike the shorter poems and songs that sometimes arrived almost complete, Celestial Conversations required sustained thought, return, expansion, and revision. Its structure depended upon dialogue, philosophical and spiritual questioning, recurring ideas, and an extended conversation that could not be completed in a single moment of inspiration. Even now, I do not feel that it is as polished as it could be. Its later edits, along with the eventual creation of its sequel, Stellar Musings, continued into the decades that followed. Some works seem to announce when they are finished. Others continue growing with the person who wrote them.
When I began taking college courses during the second half of my twenties, my writing changed again. I returned more frequently to stories and began what became the still-unpublished Into Sin series. My poetry also became increasingly complicated and experimental. Works such as 777: The Palindrome Play demanded a different kind of creation. Instead of relying primarily upon spontaneous inspiration, emotional expression, melody, or narrative, I began constructing poems through symmetry, reversal, pattern, wordplay, and deliberate formal constraint. The architecture of the poem became part of its meaning.
I discovered Oulipo, the French Workshop of Potential Literature, from my professor, William Gillsepie, and adopted WoPoLi as its English rendering. Its exploration of writing through rules, patterns, structures, and self-imposed limitations gave me a language for something I had already begun doing on my own. I became determined to explore every poetic form I could find. Each form presented a different question: What can be created within these rules? What possibilities are hidden inside a limitation? How can structure guide imagination rather than restrict it?
During my thirties, that curiosity expanded. It was no longer enough to explore every form I could discover. I wanted to explore every form I could invent. I began creating new poetic structures, developing rules, experimenting with patterns, and examining the ways that rhyme, meter, syllable count, repetition, symmetry, visual arrangement, word choice, and other constraints could generate possibilities that might never appear in unrestricted writing. Form itself became a subject of exploration.
Throughout my twenties and into my thirties, relationship conflict also became a major theme. Those poems drew upon personal experience, emotional contrast, memory, dialogue, disappointment, love, anger, hope, and attempts at understanding. Some were intimate lyrics. Some told stories. Some spoke directly to another person, whether or not that person would ever read them. Others used symbolism, metaphor, or imagined voices to approach experiences that were difficult to address directly. The subject remained personal, but the techniques varied as I continued discovering new ways to give emotion a shape.
Looking back, I do not see a single point at which my childhood writing ended and my adult writing began. The transition was gradual and shaped more by circumstance than by age. The child wrote because words seemed to arrive and asked to be preserved. The young mother composed songs because her hands were busy and singing allowed poetry to survive within a life that left little time for paper. The college student returned to stories and increasingly complex structures. The poet in her thirties searched for every form she could find and then began creating forms of her own.
My writing changed because my life changed, but the need to create remained. When I had paper, I wrote. When I had no time to write, I sang. When I discovered structure, I explored it. When existing forms were no longer enough, I began inventing new ones.
Through childhood, motherhood, work, marriage, education, conflict, faith, music, and experimentation, poetry continued adapting to whatever my life allowed it to become. I did not stop writing when responsibility consumed my time. I changed the way I carried the words.