Unit 6

Unit 6

Lecture

Writing “roots or family” poetry.

About the Poem Content

In a “roots” poem you will consider your point of origin. Trace your relatives back as far as you can or as far back as you want to go. I know that some of you will feel that you don’t know who you are – a lot of the time students have never thought to ask their parents or other relatives their genetic makeup or as is my case – you might be adopted and can’t trace who you are.

There are several ways of looking at this subject matter for your poem content though. We have worked this semester in several units with memory and landscape. These two areas are where you begin a poem like this. In the video readings you will listen to two poems that handle the subject differently. In one the poet traces his imaginary heritage through rivers and in the other the poet uses a memory of mother to trace who she is now.

In the use of family as poem content, you can paint in your poem a portrait of a family member that influenced you greatly. By showing the reader this portrait, you show “who you are” in a psychological or emotional sense. Your portrait can include more than one person, for example your mother and father or grandparents or sisters/brothers.

The four example poems in this unit use landscape very strongly to connect back. In the poems “Promise” and “Wilsonville Story,” the poets use regionalism to let us know “who their people are.” This is a good tool to use if you don’t want to or can’t trace ethnicity. Place names establish a “region” and help to tell the reader, “my people were farmers or merchants, or steel workers”; it will be the specificity of detail that sets the scene.

The “roots” or “family” poem can have the following characteristics:

a strong sense of place, history, nature, region, or landscape

i.e. specific place names, terms associated with those topics – any words that help ground the reader in the subject,

a sense of personal history

i.e. this is “your” story – the personal names are people you know

a sense of movement through time or memory

The above characteristics are suggestions for your poem’s editing process. After you’ve drafted your poem for this unit, you’ll want to go back through to see if the poem fulfills the expectations of the assignment. This is part of the editing process.

Let’s look at the following example poem by Candice Rowe. Explication will follow.

“Promise”

Don’t confuse me with Kit Carson’s whites

men of swords and power

My father’s people are Swamp Yankees

poor and simple

smelling of wood dust and

working shoe shop compressors till they’re deaf

fingernails thick with machine oil.

And my mother...

You’d like her simple, round-faced people

bleeding geese and stuffing intestines

slaughtering Rhode Island reds and Easter lambs

believing in star-crosses in the sky when people die

and the Bible.

People without a word of English too

selling orange butter

and home pressed cheese

and moonshine.

I’m not kidding

the still was under the barn cellar

the smell of cows and horse-hot

grainy fruity

My people sweet and hard as springtime pears

I promise you.

Explication: Notice the repetition of the word “poeple” to establish this list of details painting a portrait of the poet’s roots.

Another roots or family poem, this one is by Errol Miller, explication will follow.

“Wilsonville Story”

Very few men cross

the velvet no-man’s land of poverty, they

fix flats for a living or shovel chicken manure

East or West or otherwise, they plant

a few mustard greens out back and browse

through month after month of a Rexall Calendar,

waiting for spring, waiting for summer,

waiting for something.

But the future doesn’t happen,

it just creeps in on silent crow’s feet

from literature, postponed, it seems, in favor

of the status quo. A man drinks a few “light” beers

and declares himself a failure, easily slighted

by friend or foe in Lean-to slantback

Bars & Grills lining Highway 25.

These are

the pale grey men of history,

sweeping through the heartland of Dixie in battered

pickups and dingy baseball caps, they color this century

with their residue, the power and the glory of

their sacrifice, like Civil War cannon fodder they

disintegrate into old men huddled around

the square, huddled over coffee at McDonald’s,

huddled close to the edge of a baffling surreal

borderland where bills are paid in full

and the beer is cold and free

and the tenants are finely clothed

in a world of beauty similar

to Tara before the war.

Explication: There’s a difference in this poem and the first – what is the difference? Send me your thoughts with your “reader’s response” for this unit.

Original poem by Dorothy Barnett
Explication

Links to other poems about family or roots in the student literary journal:

The Rio Review – Spring 1998

Family

The Power of Time by Jennifer Adair

Roots? by Jennifer Adair

A Fleeting White Silk Moment by Judith Glenn

Lightness at Once by Judith Glenn

A Family Cycle by Jason Mondine

Full Moon Conception by David Nelson

Roots by Anna Rather

Gruta by Audrey Woods