I hope everyone is enjoying the long light of these early-ish June days!
Here is a prose poem I started over a year or so ago which, though I have worked on it quite a bit, I still consider a first draft. The last word in particular is problematic, though something in me keeps insisting upon it!
BIRTH
IN THE TIME OF EBOLA
8
Oct 2014 MONROVIA Doctors are charging extortionate fees to
women to give birth—not a new practice, but the fee has gone up, said a doctor
who asked to remain unnamed, linked to the associated risk of a potential Ebola-positive
birth.
Between contractions, she hears numbers.
Not birth numbers—the minutes between, centimeters dilated—but the same number
in the administrator’s mouth: 400. A
room number? Is it the pain or is Abdullah’s face turning grey? 400. Dollars. To be allowed inside to
give birth? Five babies she birthed in this hospital and never a mention of $400
to simply get inside the doors. Another wave breaks. She bears down on her
husband’s hand. Closes her eyes, the world going grey. When the pain passes and
she opens her eyes again, it is to blinding daylight. Diesel fumes. Traffic
din, horns and whistles. Her nostrils stuffed with dust. Women’s voices.
Women’s hands, hands that don’t ask questions, do not deal in numbers but
something beyond numbers. She hears the cry of the first child. Before the
second begins his descent, she gazes up at women, ringed around her in the
middle of Monrovia in the middle of a midweek day, mid-wives all now, holding
up skirts and headscarves to shield her, like a hospital curtain, like a veil,
protective, free.
Dear Claire,
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this very powerful poem. There’s a lot I admire about it: to begin, I think you do a wonderful job of capturing the full experience of the speaker. More specifically, the poem is structured really effectively around what’s happening in the hospital and outside of it. I especially found the contrast between intimacy (“She bears down on her husband’s hand. Closes her eyes, the world going grey) and the external world (Diesel fumes. Traffic din, horns and whistles) to be highly effective.
My biggest question is: why this form? I understand that it’s a narrative style, but (for me at least) the poem might be better served by line endings and white spaces to create pauses, inflections, emphases. I wanted, in short, for the poem to show down a bit and have more of punctuation (i.e. verses). James Longenbach says something very interesting about the prose poem in The Art of the Poetic Line. This genre, unlike lineated verse, puts special pressure on the syntax of the sentence (and not the line) to create the variation and digression (109). It’s also a genre that makes conceptual leaps and imaginative leaps into different scenes and/or temporalities. I’m not sure if you would agree with this definition and, to be clear, I’m not saying that this is what a prose poem IS in any kind of definitive way. But I wanted to share since I find Longenbach very interesting. So for me, your poem seems to be doing something different and, to my mind, it seems to be delving into a lyric moment and exploring it in really rich ways. Sorry to be long winded! This is my way of suggesting that you play with form!
I agree about the word “free.” Needing to protect (which I think this poem is very much about) seems to be at odds with freedom. I wonder if you might elaborate what that final scene looks like so that you end with an image? This isn’t right and is a bad example, but perhaps it looks like birds of a flock or something (again NOT that. I just wanted to illustrate what I mean). I hope that this is helpful!
Thanks for sharing this piece!
Shannon
Hi Claire! I agree that this is a powerful piece. I have to admit that I am mystified in general by the status of the prose poem. I'm never quite sure about it, and I found Shannon's note with James Longenbach's ideas very useful. In your piece, I know I appreciated all the repetition in the poem, and especially of middle/midweek/midwives... I'm not sure what more to suggest... I tried out a few combinations for the end
ReplyDeletelike a veil, protective, free of charge.
like a veil, a comfort, free of charge.
like a veil, a comfort, no strings attached, no questions asked.
Hope you have a good week!
Claire,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the poem! One argument for keeping this poem in prose-poem form is the directness and informality associated with a block of text versus a lyric. To my mind, there is a degree of “fanciness” in line breaks, stanzas, white space. A poem in lines hearkens, on some level, to Greek lyric and to Europe and a leisured class. In Monrovia, in the circumstances you’re describing, ain’t nobody got time to ponder where a line should break. The prose-poem form you’ve chosen helped bring home for me the urgency and desperateness of the situation.
This poem made me wonder about poems in a manuscript that are “outliers” in terms of setting and form. I find them hard to place among other poems that are more consistent with one another. I do think it adds a lot of depth to a volume when poems are diverse in setting, form, etc. But I find it puzzling, how to organize the MS so that an “outlier” poem feels as helpful as possible.
I think the poem is working quite well. Playing around with pruning and syntactical compression could help make the language even more exciting. I like the suggestion of ending with “free of charge.” I found “free” alone to be confusing—both abstract and thus a bit squishy, and also out of step with the evident lack of real freedom as described in these circumstances.
Good luck!