Finding Yourself Again: A Memory Poem

Welcome to the September Open Write! Below is your writing inspiration, some ideas for getting started, and a sample poem. When you are ready, post your poem in the comment section below.

Would you like to meet other Open-Writers? Join us online Sunday night @5pm (CT) for a very informal gathering. We will talk about our writing experiences and poems. You can share a poem or just listen. Sign up here to receive the Zoom link.

Today’s Inspiration

The beginning of the school year is a great time for students to read and write about themselves. Today’s writing prompt is to encourage you to think about the first time you experienced something or when something seemingly mundane occurred, but you knew it changed you in some way. Today’s prompt is an invitation to find that person you once were and to explore how you felt and reacted during a particular time in your life.

My mentor poet is Debra Marquart whose poetry has always inspired me. The first time I was introduced to her poetry was in the early nineties at an ICTE meeting. She shared her poetry with her group called The Bone People. Since then Debra Marquart has received several honors, including the Iowa Poet Laureate award in 2019. You can read more about her at the following link: https://engl.iastate.edu/directory/debra-marquart/

Process

In Marquart’s poem “Motorcade,” she shares a moment in her childhood. Our childhood experiences, whether painful, wonderful, or a blend of both, are often rich with vivid memories. One activity I have had students do to recall memories of their younger selves is to ask them to close their eyes and to begin visualizing a favorite place and activity they enjoyed as children. After talking them through visualizing a scene, I ask them to sketch a scene depicting their memory. This visualization exercise can help one to rebuild sensory details of an experience. Consider taking the time to recall a moment, remembering the sights, sounds, smells, etc. from your own past, sketch it, and then see where your writing takes you.

Debra Marquart’s poem “Motorcade” from her book Everything is a Verb.

Motorcade

From here it becomes necessary
To ship all bodies east.
        --Thomas McGrath

I was seven when it happened
in the second grade, but old enough
to know it was serious
when Sister Jacinta, bleary-eyed
and wrinkled, announced
that our Catholic President had been shot. We rose,
hands over our hearts to say
the Pledge-Allegiance, then hands
together to pray the Our-Father
although, I believe, all along,
we understood we were praying
for the soul and not the man.

What I remember most is Ronnie Bissell
sneezing through everything..
A tin of pepper on his desk,
for what I don’t recall
perhaps show-and-tell,
but some dark itching powder
had gotten into his nose.
And somehow I’ve always known
that he enjoyed it,
the body betraying itself
at that very solemn moment.
He was the flamboyant one,
class clown, moved away
after graduation, like all of us.
I never heard from him again
until last year when I saw
his obituary in the paper:
still single, his address
listed as San Francisco. Bodies
are flown back to us from places
less parochial. How immune
we believed ourselves to be
so far from the swirling locus
of events. There are moments
like these in history
that hold themselves up
like great roaring surfaces,
too large to reveal anything,
but that one single frame
from the movie
of our own lives. That night,

we watched it on the news:
the motorcade running the gauntlet
President Kennedy alive and smiling
then dead, alive and smiling,
then dead. Jackie in her pillbox hat
and short waist-coat, crawling
onto the trunk of the convertible,
almost reaching the arms
of the secret service man, almost
going backward for one long moment,
while all else rushed forward,
then thinking better
and returning to the back seat,
to her already dead husband,
the motorcade picking up speed
and accelerating madly
out of view of the camera.

Barb’s Poem

Smoke Rings

at the A & P
Debbie expertly palms a pack of Pall Malls;
slips them into the back of her bell bottom jeans
we shimmy through the doors, unafraid—
sprawled beneath the Marion water tower,
a few blocks away,
we practice blowing smoke rings—
she’s more experienced than me
artfully sending one oval after another
through her bright red lips
into the blue white sky—
I watch amazed,
clinging one-handed to the unmowed grass,
feeling the earth shift beneath me;
whirl out of control

Our Host

Barb Edler lives in Keokuk, Iowa and teaches English Composition part-time at Iowa Wesleyan University in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa. Barb has been a participant of the Iowa Writing project and loves to inspire students to take risks and to find their own writer’s voice. She enjoys spending time with her family, watching the Mississippi River roll by, reading, and being inspired by the wonderful writers of the Ethical ELA writing community.