October 12, 2006 05:32 pm
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By Mary Claire Mahaney
First of a 6-part series
How do you name a child?
Over lunch one day I learned how my Japanese friend and her husband named their daughter. I didn’t follow everything my friend told me, but many factors had apparently come into play for them, including the relationship between the number of strokes in the Chinese characters for the family’s name and the baby’s name, the parents’ given names and their meanings, and the name of the mountain where my friend and her husband prayed that the gods would give them a child. My friend asked me how Americans name children. Given the names she’d heard in America, she’d decided our naming was done on the basis of what sounds good.
I told my friend sound is important in naming a child, but so are family traditions. We gave our first child his father and grandfather’s middle name, Edward. We named our second child for two great-grandfathers (including George D. Mahaney of Sharpsville), two uncles, a great-uncle (George F. Mahaney), and a great-great-uncle. We like that our sons bear family names, and we like their meanings: Edward is Old English for prosperous guardian, George means farmer in Latin. My husband’s father’s family, 19th-century German immigrants, farmed in rural Cincinnati, and our younger son’s name recalls that heritage.
In fact, when our George set off for kindergarten, I often thought he would be happier in fields, picking berries or digging dirt, than he was in a classroom, learning how to hold a pencil. I wondered what quicker, perhaps easier, success would have been George’s if he’d been born with land to till and crops to rotate. But farming was not to be his lot.
Several years ago I wrote a few verses on George’s birthday card. The verses were inspired both by his name and by his favorite childhood pastime - tree climbing. Since before George was born we’ve lived in a townhouse, with a brick and stonework garden rather than a back yard of grass, but our gate opens onto the neighborhood park. In the park’s acres of grass and wood George spent many happy hours, mostly in trees - crab apple and cherry, tulip, maple and pine, while I spent many hours beneath trees, watching him climb, praying he wouldn’t fall.
Children did fall from those trees, and some were hurt, yet George seemed to suffer nothing more than an occasional scraped knee, and that from contact with bark, not ground. It was as though George was part of the trees, or they were part of him. I wanted his birthday verses to reflect how I had cared for George while he was growing up. I also wanted my son to see the connection between his name and those growing, living things he loves.
While my son loves trees, and video games, and driving a car, I love to write verse, so I have enrolled in a class, Advanced Poetry, offered by the publishers of Writer’s Digest magazine (www.writersonlineworkshops.com). The course runs six weeks, and weekly each of us students (we are eight, plus the teacher) posts a poem for critique. As writers, we must decide whether to accept or reject suggestions for revision, and if to accept them, exactly how to incorporate them into our work.
Writing, I’ve found, is more revising than anything else, and poetry is no exception. In this class we aren’t required to submit redrafts, so we don’t necessarily know what effect our critiques have had. I’m publishing in these pages, though, both my “before” and “after” verses, to show how my revision process works.
Here is my “before” posting:
a georgic poem
vining
climbing
out of the earth
swept into trees
away from the woman
who labored your birth
you peek out through flat leaves
peering down at her feet
planted still on the earth
pacing
frowning
calling you down
“not so high, george!”
mary-go-round
tills circles beneath
bending the grass
dirt seen from above
a path-ring of love
god blesses the earth
with rain and sun and
you, george, boy of mirth
farmer son
skyward one
The first issue was the title. Last summer I changed the title from “a boy named george” to “a georgic poem” as a result of a poetry course I was taking at the University of Minnesota, in which I learned about georgic poetry. (Georgic poetry is named for The Georgics, Virgil’s very long poem about agriculture.) The title was presenting me with a problem for two reasons: many people haven’t heard of georgic poetry, and, technically, georgic poetry is didactic, intended for instruction on the business of farming. My poem is didactic in neither design nor result, but I am smitten with the connection between the word georgic and my subject—word play is as hard for me to pass up as a tree was for my young son. So even if readers overlook the connection to Virgil, I decided to leave the title “a georgic poem.”
Next, I tightened the text, deleting the definite article, changing climbing out of the earth to up from the earth, and removing a superfluous preposition (out in line seven). I changed peering to peer in line eight, for it is the boy who is peering, not the leaves, and I hadn’t noticed the confusion my verb form created. I added the pronoun she after line nine, to clarify that at the second stanza the actor is the woman rather than the boy. Again, the original had been confusing.
I took out pacing — it’s redundant. I also removed dirt seen from above because it confuses point of view. I rejected the suggestion to delete farmer son. I also seriously considered, and rejected, for the time being, a major structural change—to make the third stanza parallel to the first two by beginning the third stanza with participial forms. I like the idea of parallel structure, though, and the more I read the poem, the more I sense the third stanza is truncated; perhaps in yet another draft I will expand it.
Here are my revised verses:
a georgic poem
vining
climbing
up from the earth
swept into trees
away from the woman
who labored your birth
you peek through flat leaves
peer down at her feet
planted still on the earth
she
frowning
calling you down
“not so high, george!”
mary-go-round
tills circles beneath
bending the grass
a path-ring of love
god blesses the earth
with rain and sun and
you, george, boy of mirth
farmer son
skyward one
So that’s one poem and one week’s worth of critique and revision. Meanwhile, George, who stuck with his schoolwork, is at this moment mulling over which college’s offer of admission to accept. He plans to study philosophy, psychology, and economics, an ambition that leaves little room for agriculture. He may have time for an occasional lean against a tree, though, and I hope he’ll always remember his roots.
Mary Claire Mahaney is completing her first novel, “Osaka Heat.” She lives in McLean, Virginia, and can be reached at marycmahaney@msn.com You can visit her website at www.maryclairemahaney.com
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Photos
George Mahaney-Walter at age 3.
Mary Claire Mahaney