family history (+suggestions)

[Tracy Mitchell]

Mightily impressed, Dave! You are writing at a high level with this poem, and digging deep. I think you should fight the compulsion to present it all in 20 lines. The revision reduces the poem from about 200 words to just over 100. In my view the result is a condensed summary which leaves too much behind.

The traumatic incidents of the poem need to be fairly described for the reader. The death in the war of Gramma’s son triggers her grief. Speakers’s mother has her own grief over the death of her brother, and on top of that the shame which is embedded in her by Gramma’s grief. Speaker’s mother loses her own son to some unspecified disease which causes grief and probably further deepens her sense of shame and unworthiness. Her husband, Speaker’s father, is an alcoholic - resulting from the loss of his son? or from trying to cope with a marriage to someone in deep and chronic grief/shame/guilt? The night he went out the window for more booze with her trying to stop him is dramatic and emotion-laden. It is perhaps just the most dramatic scene of a larger number that the Speaker and speaker’s sister grew up with. She is obviously traumatized as well.

Shame, guilt and grief are intertwined, but remain three separate things. The narrative does not give itself room to treat each of these. Shame, guilt, and grief are complex, layered, and heavily nuanced. And the poem has several important characters. All of the provides the backdrop for the Speaker’s coming to grips with his emotional situation.
From the original I would like to see this make its way back to the next draft–

My brother Michael could not swallow
and so was himself swallowed.
My mother nursed her grief from
teething to the her death bed,
where she unfolded loss and sorrow
like a child’s birth clothes.

Additionally, the original gave us much more insight into the Speaker’s sister and her experience and her search for prodigal redemption – an incredible concept which I would like to see developed more. Instead, it got conflated to ‘prodigal love’. That’s a provocative phrase, but the original is more so.

A couple of years ago we did a poetry contest on another site which challenged us to write bigger poems. This is the perfect substance/subject matter for a bigger poem. I want to encourage the expansion of this poem to do justice to each of the characters. They more you get them right, and the more you get the emotional milieu right, the better chance you have when the time comes, to get the Speaker’s psyche rightly revealed.

Always love reading your work, Dave. There is so much in this now, but I think the next revisions need to made outwardly.

Just my opinion, use or lose as you choose.

Cheers.

T

[Dave]

My god Tom thats so much to digest. Thanks for all that time and interest Nd a tough task , to expand. Cutting is easy but growing thevpoem. I need time to digest your suggestions and make a go of it.