October 19, 2006 09:01 am
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By Mary Claire Mahaney
Second of a 6-part series
I know that book’s here somewhere. If we just look a little harder, surely it will turn up.
We were scouring the house for Snow White and Rose Red, a Little Golden Book I had written about last summer in an assignment for a poetry class. My childhood memory of the book was triggered when one of my classmates introduced herself. Now, for my new, online poetry class—Advanced Poetry at www.writersonlineworkshops.com - I pulled that poem from my files and posted it for critique.
Split Rock Anamnesis
for Snezana
Snow White. My Little Golden Book (trademark
protected) leaves turned when you said your name
that night. Snow White. Your hair and eyes are dark
so I renamed you for White’s sister who looks the same
as you. Rose Red. You rose from fairy tale
fantasies, romantic country, my immature wits
hidden by middle-aged dress, the way your pale
face and skinny clothes hid where you fit,
Snow White Rose Red. Amid bear tracks and war ruins
you reckon syllables and lift your right eyebrow
and I mull over that you once killed bruins
in the Serbian woods. Fortune endowed
Rose with fetching good looks from timeless times,
exotic voice refulgent in rhyme sublime.
I wrote “Split Rock Anamnesis” for a homework assignment during a week-long course at the University of Minnesota, offered through the school’s Split Rock Arts Program. The course dealt with formal poetry, or poetry that follows certain rules. We had studied sonnets that day. The next day was to be our last class.
Anticipating the lofty verses I’d be tapping out my laptop that evening, over dinner I made notes on truth and beauty, but back in my hotel room nothing I wrote was worth keeping. The later the evening grew, the more I worried, for I had to write a second poem that night too. Even the word sonnet was making me nervous—I had never tried to write one before, and the form seemed sacred. The ghosts of William Shakespeare and Elizabeth Barrett Browning floated expectantly at my side.
I thought back over the week and how much I’d enjoyed the class. We were six students plus the teacher (all women), aged nineteen to, well, we covered a wide range. The previous Sunday evening, before classes began, we’d met to pick up our packets, introduce ourselves, and get the lay of the land.
One student had introduced herself in a European accent I couldn’t quite place. “Snezana,” she’d said her name was. “Snow White.” (Literally, it’s more like “Snow Ann,” she told us later. She’d wanted to put her name in terms familiar to us at the first meeting.) As soon as “Snow White” left Snezana’s tongue, the wheels in my little head started to turn.
“Snezana,” I thought, “you don’t look like Snow White, but you do look like Snow White’s sister, Rose Red.” These girls were the principal characters in a childhood book of mine that I hadn’t thought of in years; Snow White was blond and blue-eyed, Rose Red brunette and dark-eyed. Snow White and Rose Red is set in the woods, and, even at a young age, I knew the woods were in a different world. (Snezana, it turns out, grew up in Serbia.)
That night, in the agonies and pleasures of trying to cobble together something that would pass as a sonnet, I gave up on truth and beauty. Instead, I paid attention to how I felt over the fact that the class was ending. Seven of us had shared laughter, tears, histories, and fantasies. I hated that shortly we’d never be together again as a group. Some of us had come from points far from Minneapolis, from opposite coasts in fact, although Snezana herself had long been a local. I was going to write my sonnet about the class.
*****
As soon as saw my sonnet up for critique online, I noticed one mistake after another - I should have made that image resonate more; I should have italicized those words; I should have clarified those verb tenses. I looked at it more from a distance, with eyes that hadn’t been in class with me last summer. No one could possibly understand what I was trying to say!
Once the critiques were in, my fears were realized. The reactions reminded me of the line that comes after a man tells a joke no one gets: “I guess you had to be there.” What had seemed self-evident among my Split Rock class was lost on my online class and teacher. While I’ve read a lot of poetry I don’t understand, I didn’t want my poem to fall in the “I don’t get it” category.
The Shakespearean sonnet, my template, has a rhyme scheme of ababcdcdefefgg. The form calls for a turning, or pivot, at line nine, where the poet begins a counter-argument, a “but” clause, which the ending couplet wraps up in an epiphany or resolution. I remember trying to work that turning into my sonnet; nine months later I was having trouble finding it.
When editing this time around, I initially tried to keep as many rhymes as possible, wary of having to find new ones. Once I was paging through Willard R. Espy’s Words to Rhyme With, however, I remembered how much I like to find rhymes, and ultimately I changed almost half the line-ending words. I stuck with my original choice of meter, iambic tetrameter, counting the beats on my fingers. I tried to clarify the story of the poem, yet leave something to the imagination. As for the turning, it begins in line twelve (a bit late), with the resolution appearing in the last line.
Finally, I attended to the title. Nobody but me, it seems, has heard of Split Rock. The name added to the confusion. Anamnesis (recollection) wasn’t helping either. I put a new title to work for me, using it to set the stage and, I hope, convey information. In poetry, especially formal poetry, the writer must justify every syllable.
Poetry class introductions
for Snezana
Snow White. My Little Golden Book’s trademark-
protected leaves turned when you said your name.
I thought, Snow White? Your hair and eyes are dark,
so I named you for the girl who looks the same
as you - Rose Red. You rose out of fairy tale
fantasy, romantic country. My juvenile wits
were concealed by solid shoes, as your pale
face and punkish clothes hid where you fit,
Snow White, Rose Red. Amid castle ruins and bear tracks
I had you reckoning syllables and writing cinquains,
you a character in a forgotten story, a throwback
to my childhood. The fact is a modern Serbian
you were, so my flight to that other place
ran false. That said, my dreams I won’t erase.
*****
To accompany this article, a photo of me, reading Snow White and Rose Red, would be perfect. So where was the book? Although I thought I’d read it within the past year (after my Split Rock class), I hadn’t seen it around the house. Had I simply imagined the recent reading? Maybe the book was lost years ago.
My husband made three trips to our attic to rummage through boxes. He found a stack of Little Golden Books, but SWRR wasn’t among them. We perused our bookshelves. I removed shelves’ worth of books to see if it had fallen behind anything. I looked among my painting supplies—maybe I’d queued it up as the subject of a still life. I searched through files, under furniture, and, at first randomly, then systematically, through stacks of papers and books lying around the house. Might our son have it in his Manhattan apartment? Ed’s a bibliophile, but this is a children’s book, and not one he ever particularly liked. I had unpacked his books at his new place; it hadn’t been among them.
Not finding my copy, I looked for copies belonging to others. I performed a Google search and saw SWRR offered for sale at fifty-five dollars. The book’s potential market value made me wonder if thieves had broken into our house and stolen it (and only it). There’ve been no signs of illegal entry, though, so I abandoned that line of reasoning.
The book is bound to turn up, as books do. The silver lining to this cloud is that I needn’t have my picture taken. I like to imagine myself somewhat exotic in aspect, and photos always remind me that I’m not.
We moved to Plan B, photographing the Little Golden Books we did find - Cleo, Pantaloon, The Big Brown Bear, and Dennis the Menace - A Quiet Afternoon, all inscribed inside the front cover in my mother’s hand. In them she wrote both my name and who gave me each one. There’s Daddy’s name; here’s my sister’s. These books, I can see, are priceless.
I’d thought this story would be about how recollection inspires writing, but it’s just as much about taking journeys—into an attic, into the middle of America, into relationships. We were all travelers that week in Minneapolis. What made it possible for us to travel together was our love of poetry and our openness to each other. As for those highfalutin verses I set out to write, fate had something else in mind. I may still write a sonnet on truth and beauty, but it will have to wait until I find my Little Golden Book.
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
Mary Claire Mahaney