for Ruby Lou
What shall we wear
to our nervous breakdown?
A tiara and red lipstick.
I'll bring the champagne!
There’s something about a pillbox
hat; maybe we’ll channel Jackie O.
Why not diamonds? (It all depends on
where our flashbacks take us.)
Pearls are always a sane choice. But what if
the white coats lock them up?
No, not pearls. When we twist
the string, it snaps. They roll. Trust me,
we’ll be chasing
those crazy little balls for years.
(Based on a friend's Facebook status and resulting comments.
I feel like it needed a weighty title to offset the silliness, and to make it fit with my Roads of Stone collection, but I'm not sure this is the right one.)
11 comments:
I wonder what the deleted comment was! Mine posted twice the other day and I had to delete the duplicate.
Angeline - I'm glad you had the explanation at the bottom, I was wondering why this was so different from your other work.
When I read it, I pictured an over-the-top Blanche at the end of a bad production of Streetcar Named Desire.
Didn't find it silly so much as flippant about mental health…people joke about it all the time, because they're afraid of it.
I'd like to see something less surface than the clichés ( nervous breakdown? champagne! Jackie O. Diamonds. Pearls. White coats. Crazy little balls. ) that have come from, maybe, a found poem process that needs to be augmented?
Sorry if this comes across harsh - I'm just not a fan of this piece like I am of your other work so far.
I do agree the title isn't working with the material, but maybe if they matched better I'd like both more? :)
The deleted comment was spam: a long message from a guy explaining why the word "For" in Romans means that we must be baptized to be saved.
Does it make a difference if the person joking about a mental illness has a mental illness? I found it refreshing that she could laugh about her pain. Maybe that only works on Facebook though.
I'll bring the champagne to toast your stillborn baby? There's something about a pillbox hat to distract the neighbours from my cancer? What if the white coats lock my pearls up with my homeless son, overdue VISA payment, the world's last ounce of morphine? When we twist the string, it snaps like your autistic teenager, your infected legs that may never walk again? Knowing everything the speaker has been through shows just how non-flippant she's being, but having her and her friend list her problems in this dialogue brings down the joyful moment significantly!
No, stating things so baldly isn't necessarily what you want. You could try a couple of things: change the title so that it hints more strongly at the speaker's multiple troubles; include a detail or two that are a bit more unexpected (either more mundane or more extravagant); maybe look for an alternate to "nervous breakdown" although I'm not completely convinced you need that.
It's hard to capture the sense/detail level you have as an insider, and brutal to list them all to an outsider…and while you are an insider on your friends pain, is it to the level that you want to publicly write a poem about it? and in this particular tone?
- if you have never read Anne Simpson's essays Marram Grass: poetry & otherness, maybe something in that may speak to you?
(I hope I'm thinking of the right book…)
I would agree with losing the term "nervous breakdown" altogether as it is…over-determined, maybe? in any case, not needed, I agree: if you are determined to keep this poem, find a different and creative way to describe her state, or else just let the details carry it, and piece them together differently. Lose words like "sane" and "crazy" for the same reason.
Reading this again today, part of the problem beyond what I already stated is the "plural we/our" in the opening and throughout the rest, and the exclamative "I'll bring the champagne" third sentence in -- it is the most problematic of statements because of not only not being about what the person will wear, but being an interruptive singular/first-person statement. It's one of the things that least belongs.
The title is the other.
Subject matter, well, my in-law from Jamaica can make observations about his experiences first-person that I would not repeat word-for-word because it would be inappropriate/misappropriate. I'm not a black man, and telling the same jokes as him in the same way is going to fall flat. Does that make sense? I can find creative ways, however, to capture some of those essential truths, perhaps, without being inappropriate/misappropriating.
So verbatim is not working right now…that's all I got!
I'm not a black man, but I am a mom of two autistic children and a lost pregnancy. Ruby, anyway, trusts me to speak for her.
Not saying don't write it; just saying that maybe if you adjust/try some of the suggestions Joanne and I have offered, or try something else yourself, that will make a difference.
Harper Lee wasn't a black man either. But she was also quite aware of that while writing, which informed her choices and approach. Our own experiences can make us sympathetic/empathetic to other experiences. Walking with others can also school us.
But writing humour about someone else's tragedies is a tough one to pull off. Starting with a colloquialism like "nervous breakdown" only exacerbates it.
So what I think is: you have to make the choice to either enter fully into this voice and this space and make this a different poem, or back up from it to make it a different poem.
Either way it requires some revision to work as a poem in a collection - and either a new title, or content which reflects the current title?
Easier said than done, but that's the way of revisions. They are the hard work that makes for good writing…good luck.
I don't see it as finding humour in another's tragedy. I see it as two friends sitting on a hospital bed together offering each other lipstick. It's not someone else's: it's mine. It's not a tragedy: it's just life when you're parenting children with autism. It says no matter how much we feel like running away from home or ending it, we still long to feel beautiful, together. I thought the colloquialisms made it less clinical (I was imagining myself breaking out of Arkham Asylum), but I'll take them out. I think I have to set this aside. The process has overshadowed the giddy feeling I first had when I read that my friend who usually can't get out of bed wanted to strut in pearls.
I think the detail you put in your last comment is some of the context missing to the reader, when/if you come back to it. Relationship and context.
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