I'm making a collage, tearing and piecing
together parts of my life,
wishing to find a pattern that will please.
Choosing my pieces,
I come across
the key from a small
treasure chest
I inherited from my
nanny's daughter.
In there, a
collection of awards for
the athlete I
once was;
a newspaper photo, me, miss Congeniality;
A wee blue silk flower
that only reminds me
of the giver's words: you don't deserve it;
Why did I
keep it all these years, mom?
Et une lettre from
mémère (who knew I was
an artist before I
did) asking me please
to build her angel
wings pour noël.
The first piece to
my collage: a small key
to a box that I will
keep locked in a spot
of my bedroom closet, top
shelf.
6 comments:
This is a brilliant start. I am going to suggest you do what Anne Simpson suggested I do to all my work, and that is to cut the opening stanza etc. and dig right into the poem. Anne says I "ramp up" and then "ramp down" whereas the real poem is in the middle!
An alternate beginning would be to take the word Collage and cite the definition from the dictionary.
Then build us the collage bit by bit.
e.g.,
Un collage
collage: an artistic composition made of various materials (as paper, cloth, or wood) glued on a surface.~Oxford English Dictionary
A key from a small treasure chest...
Thanks for this, Suzanne.
That blue flower-- small objects can be so heavy with memories.
In the second-last stanza the phrase in parentheses feels important... it feels like it needs a more prominent place. I'd even suggest moving that stanza to the final place, and ending with that phrase.
Hmm.. interesting.
Aw I love Anne Simpson. Yes on-ramps and off-ramps! Gotta look out for those. We often write our way into things and then can drop them once we hit the sweet spots, I so know this from my own work. I also tend to overwrite the end and need to drop that bookend too. Good reminder.
I love collages. Maybe you can as you rework this make it like that. Each stanza is its own collage piece that makes a whole picture... the idea already is there the the form serves the content.
Some good ideas and some really nice physical objects to grab onto.
love htat blue silk fleur! What if you don't say what the giver's words were, and respond to them the same way?
(more mystery! and, as I've been told and told, "trust the reader" - trust the reader to guess/intuit/read in without being told all)
"key from a small treasuer chest inherited from my nanny's daughter" was sort of a long phrase for me to track
I wonder if you could change that or make it someone less complicated than your nanny's daughter for clarity sake (tweaking reality for clarity :)
overall a lovely idea and maybe you could pull in more metaphor for how we collage our life not just by saying so, or in the physical things you are showing but maybe in the emotional pieces that are sort of there already? Like, make it longer - more please!!!
:)
I love the surprise of the key ending up in the collage instead of any of the items, yet there's a sort of irony in the fact that they do end up collaged verbally in a poem. I wonder how it would read if the poem weren't in complete sentences - if the beautifully described objects lay one on top of the other?
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