The Apostrophe Blog
When I first returned to writing poetry, way back in 2005 and 2006, I took a series of classes through an organization called Writers on the Net. I was incredibly lucky to stumble on an outstanding teacher, Bob Haynes and his courses, Daydreams I and Daydreams II.
In both of these, Bob asked his students to step outside the conventional way of thinking about crafting a poem, to wildly experiment, break the rules. We wrote about random objects. We wrote a draft forwards then backwards. We shadowed the language in a first draft seeking to find new leaps and bounds. We worked with the Richard Hugo concept of “the triggering town.” We cut a draft into pieces and then picked the snips up one-by-one to arrange them into a new poem. You never knew what might end up being of service to a particular poem.
My experimental persona poem about a goodbye party for a would-be suicide, “Your Going Away Party at the Hotel Dread,” grew out of some really terrible first drafts begun in one of these Daydream classes. I took it to the class workshop for feedback then revised it, took the revised version back to the class then revisited over and over again. It was published in Margie: The American Journal of Poetry in Fall 2006—one of my first poetry publication successes! And it was a semifinalist for the Marjorie J. Wilson Award Contest that year as well. It later appeared in my chapbook, The Hours of Us.
Your Going Away Party at the Hotel Dread
The party banner of ribbon and shoelace
French-hemmed your bald spot. I went strapless,
my sundress mercy with a vermin waist.
A sneeze in the treetops convinced me
this was the send-off you wished for:
one anonymous afternoon on Possession Sound
before your remains set sail.
Punch-spiked amnesia, we whooped it up,
minuets at the hotel reception desk minutes before
your handwriting filled the pagoda,
rationalizations around the rim of an aluminum plate.
In a Mini Cooper under the porte-cochère,
a fat man with a checklist
gulped a short mug of lions. Later,
he did handstands on the terrazzo, empty
by then of Mary Rose and her retinue of grasping thoughts.
The fat man memorized safe-deposit passwords
while you dirtied up your English, drunk as ever
on complaining: no mile-high club
this time, the Edmonds to eternity leg.
Overblown with sangfroid,
you fretted the penny pebble pasta
but not me, still in life, still life,
holding the stones I gathered from the beach,
lime dots painted on their sides: the two china cups.
I grew weightless from the carbon consommé.
Sun climbed your kitchen whiteboard and its final to-do.
The hotel sharecropper, opening windows for his wife,
planted a night-blooming cereus in your side yard.
Other guests talked to invisible beggars. One,
a soft-shoe salesman, shuffled his feet,
seducing me in a tango of lamentations.
Before we ran off, I gave him your tongue,
you didn’t need it where you were going—
no guide dog beneficial celestials—later that night.
Two years after, the consequences
remain inscrutable as Sacagawea’s
nod, her last gesture toward the Pacific
before they cast that golden face on a coin.
How I hate to imagine your lids first blinding,
ocean obscured, your bone feet
shim sham on a deck rail softened by a Turkish rug,
off to the darkness or the light, you said
so yourself.
The public domain image above is a vintage post card of the Hollenden Hotel in Cleveland, Ohio.
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
- Wishing Tree - November 4, 2024
- Making It to Semi-Finalist: “Your Going Away Party at the Hotel Dread” - October 31, 2024
- Publication News: “Lamentation: A Cento” - October 25, 2024
