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Sundowning
| Dark Poetry #4 |
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Sundowning |
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JenniferMaxwell
since 2006-09-14
Posts 2423 |
In the care home for the elderly on the day room walls are two paintings of colorful summer scenes. One is of a porch, the kind you see down south in Georgia on a white-washed plantation where hot afternoons are shaded and cooled by mint juleps and a breeze stirring through the walnut groves. The other, a summer lawn in a New England seaside village where the light is lemonade yellow and the grass, always island green. These soothing images of seasons and places where the homebound can no longer go both have a common denominator - the lack of sentient beings and a row of empty and waiting chairs. Stare at them long enough and the rocking chair begins to move; the wicker leaves its imprint on the warmth of your sun tanned back. The pet you lost in childhood keeps time with its wagging tail; children grown and too busy to visit, spill Kool-Aid on the glider and knock over their Candy Land game board. The Adirondack chairs are all turned toward the sea where every afternoon a schooner waits in the harbor awash in the colors of sunset. [This message has been edited by JenniferMaxwell (05-08-2008 10:39 AM).] |
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Sunshine
Administrator
Member Empyrean
since 1999-06-25
Posts 63354Listening to every heart |
This is beautiful, Jennifer. I think I even felt a breeze whish by ... |
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Yoinn Senior Member
since 2007-08-16
Posts 649Michigan |
Thank you Jennifer for this touching poem. I read many poems that are constructed very well....but say little. This is not one of them. Thanks and i mean that Yoin |
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JenniferMaxwell
since 2006-09-14
Posts 2423 |
Thanks very much, Sunshine and Yoinn. |
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Temptress
Moderator
Member Rara Avis
since 1999-06-15
Posts 7136Mobile, AL |
wow... awesome imagery here! I absolutely love this!  "...buried way beneath the sheets |
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Bob K Member Elite
since 2007-11-03
Posts 4208 |
Dear JenniferMaxwell, Another fine poem, one to be proud of. Since you've posted it, I'm going to offer some feedback. Any you don't find immediately useful or feel doesn't fit what the poem wants from you, please feel free to discard without a second thought. The third line, "of colorful summer scenes" may not be needed at all. Your description of both the Georgia scene and the New England scene in the text following make it clear the scenes are summer scenes, and the nature of the scenes makes their colorfulness implicit. Telling us what the content will be in advance may simply be scaffolding from your early thinking about the poem that you've forgotten to take down. Here is the short section following, where you lay out the painting of the scene in Georgia: One is of a porch, the kind you see down south in Georgia on a white-washed plantation where hot afternoons are shaded and cooled by mint juleps and a breeze stirring through the walnut groves. The kind of question you want to ask yourself here, in line with my earlier comment, is what part of this writing is for my reader and what part of this is scaffolding that I'm using to indicate part of my composition process and I've forgotten to take down? Have a look: One is of a porch, [the kind you see down south] in Georgia on a white-washed plantation You can watch Jennifer Maxwell make her decision about where to put this image. It could have been in Bolivia, it could have been in New Mexico. Somebody who's been to Georgia or who lives there now, you see doesn't assume his or her readers thing of Georgia as "down south;" meaning someplace else, far away and foreign. The writer, however, might well think this way and here she is. This is a note by Jennifer Maxwell to Jennifer Maxwell about the sort of place she wants to put into her poem at this particular point. Naturally, you'd see them here, of course; at this point in the composition it's time to start to notice them, and not before. Earlier on, you don't want to get in the way of the words coming out on the page. But now is the point to start noticing the scaffolding you've left up. Having thought about this, you might want to think about (and not earlier) what order you you want to present your series of particulars about this picture. As in prose, there are more and less effective ways in which you might wish to present items in a series, depending on where you want to enter the series and what elements of the series you want to emphasize. My theory is that this will depend on the ending that you have the gut feeling works the best for the piece. Your title, "Sundowning," is to my mind one of the lovely things about the poem. When I used to work on locked psychiatric units, what we meant by "sundowning" was the way that some elderly patients became disoriented, confused, occasionally psychotic after sunset because—we thought—of the decrease in visual stimulation. I'd still like to some research on that, as a side comment. It suggests the poem is organized around loss. There may be ways in which you can structure the ordering of the details of both painting to contribute to this theme or the the feeling tone of the theme. It is also lovely the way you have excluded the actual residents themselves from the poem. This is very restrained of you. It is a rich refusal. The other, a summer lawn in a New England seaside village where the light is lemonade yellow and the grass, always island green. These soothing images of seasons and places where the homebound can no longer go both have a common denominator - the lack of sentient beings and a row of empty and waiting chairs. I might suggest "a summer lawn" is not necessary. "Always" is a slippery word. Used well, it can have considerable impact("About suffering, they were always right, the Old Masters,"). Here you use it to give us no information, which, truth be told, is the way most of us use it, as a wasted word. When one talks of grass in a painting being green, it is enough. Nobody imagines it will suddenly change color when your back is turned. You call the images you present "soothing." I would suggest that at this stage in the composition, you may be less certain that that. In the text, you haven't made it clear exactly who is supposed to be soothed. Nor have you clarified the degree of irony intended with the use of the word. This is often what happens when a writer is working at exactly the point that they need to be working, namely the point at which their own sense of threat is engaged and they are dealing with material that seems right on the expanding edge of who they are. At points like this, a poet needs to look to technique for help. Who needs the soothing? Usually the answer is the poet. It is with me, if that's any comfort to you. Usually it isn't, but it's still the case. If you're writing where you should be, you run into threatening material all the time. What I do, and it appears you may be doing it as well here—your call—is getting more abstract and polysyllabic in the face of it. Frequently if your writing is mostly one and two syllable words, where it should be most of the time, and suddenly you find big words insinuating themselves— ballooning latinity displacing your more consistent conviviality with rampaging pomposity, as it were—then you know you've hit a nerve. Only you usually only know it later, on a rereading. Pfui! I could have had a V-8! Or in your case, perhaps, both have a common denominator - the lack of sentient beings. . . As for the row of empty and waiting chairs, I'm freaking jealous, and wish I'd written that myself. The same, actually with the next two lines. In the next bit here, I'm wondering why the back has to be "sun tanned?" My difficulty has to do with the ambiguity of the "you" in this situation. In much of contemporary poetry the "you" may mean the reader or the writer and sometimes a fusion of the two. My favorite modern poem, "Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg," by Richard Hugo begins, "You might come here Sunday on a whim. Say your life broke down. The last good kiss You had was years ago. You walk these streets Laid out by the insane," . . . and Hugo uses this rhetorical convention here. With your poem, at this stage, your decision doesn't seem clear as yet. So when you use "your sun-tanned back" my subliminal inclination is to say, "Hey, White as a fish-belly here! She talking about ME?" Well, I know probably not, but there's enough ambiguity in the text at this point that the issue does come up. With Hugo, you'll notice, it's not even remotely an issue because he keeps it in front of the reader's face. "I'm talking to myself, here, Buddy!" is what he's saying; if you want to come along and identify for the ride, fine. He's able to do this by using a very macho, in-your-face stance, and that's not the stance you're using here, nor would I recommend it. But the issue may be one you'll want to wrestle with. the wicker leaves its imprint on the warmth of your sun tanned back. Is there some milage to be gained by specifying what kind of dog it was you lost? You can make up the breed, just as you may have made up the detail in the first place, but it may be that specificity may be able to add depth to the picture you're presenting here. Certainly a terrier says something different than a spaniel says something different than a giant schnauzer and so on. The pet you lost in childhood keeps time with its wagging tail; children grown and too busy to visit, spill Kool-Aid on the glider and knock over their Candy Land game board. The Adirondack chairs are all turned toward the sea where every afternoon a schooner waits in the harbor awash in the colors of sunset. I like this ending. I also wonder if it might not be improved by going more directly back to the theme of loss. Mysteriously empty of last night's passengers and crew. or Ready to set sail into the night. Both suggestions are wrong for the poem, certainly, and inferior to the line you already have there. I've looked at the poem as a poem in draft, looked at where scaffolding seemed to need to come out and addressed a few minor issues. The poem is a very good poem and will get better as you work on it whether you follow my suggestions or not. I was particularly impressed with the specificity of it and the movement of it from beginning to end. I pointed out some places where I thought there were minor snags in the flow, but the work is fine. Thanks for the chance to see it. It's full of feeling without being sentimental. Yours, BobK. |
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again.on.death.row New Member
since 2008-05-08
Posts 9Canada |
heyy this is really great. You really captured the feeling I get when step into or even think about and old age home. Nice descriptive langauge, it really puts clear images in someone's mind. Really nice! |
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JenniferMaxwell
since 2006-09-14
Posts 2423 |
Thanks, again.on.death.row.. glad you enjoyed it. Thanks very much for your feedback, Bob K. You’ve very graciously given me suggestions to help improve the poem, thank you for those. And you also pointed out things that came as a real shock for which I’m more grateful than for your help with the poem. In trying to understand why the pictures were just empty chairs, I fabricated a scenario to soothe myself - I wanted the person I care for (a surrogate mother/grandmother) who, because of dementia has left this world, to find that better place, a place of sunlight and warmth as in those pictures. In trying to understand where she goes in those sundown moments when her face goes blank and unreadable, (the threat) I painted a scene to comfort myself. I can’t reach or understand her anymore and that’s very frightening and painful (the loss). Today I took her out to sit under the cherry trees. The sun warmed to the bone and the gentlest of breezes kissed blossoms off the trees. Her unspoken gift to me was that image of her covered with cherry blossoms. Sometimes all you can do or all you need to do is to be. |
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Bob K Member Elite
since 2007-11-03
Posts 4208 |
Dear JenniferMaxwell, If we're lucky, and we're writing where we're supposed to be writing, then we often find ourselves surprised that our poems are ahead of us. Yet, there they are. In my case, I have more difficulty when I find I know where the poem's going. Then I know I've sold myself out and I'm short on courage. I've already written this poem and it's time to reorder. Best to you. You're on a hot streak. BobK. |
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