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***This is the ninety-fifth in a never-ending series called BACKSTORY
OF THE POEM where the Chris Rice Cooper Blog (CRC) focuses on one
specific poem and how the poet wrote that specific poem. All BACKSTORY
OF THE POEM links are at the end of this piece.
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#95 Backstory of the Poem
“Landscape
and Still life”
by Marjorie Maddox
Can you go through the step-by-step process
of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain
until final form? Here is some background for a poem from my re-released
collection Transplant, Transport,
Transubstantiation, which focuses on my father’s unsuccessful heart
transplant during the Blizzard of ’93.
As I discussed also in a talk at the Chautauqua Institution (https://chq.org/), at the age of 39, my father suffered his first
of ten cardiac arrests. The years of my youth were filled with ambulance sirens
snaking their way to our house. As a pre-teen, I gave him CPR. Although my
father lived until 65, he did not survive a heart transplant.
Those from the Northeast or Midwest may
remember the blizzard of 1993. I had just accepted a teaching position at Lock
Haven University in Pennsylvania. During that period, my father had been
waiting many months for a heart donor when I traveled home to Ohio to visit my
parents over spring break. Once there, I
heard ominous forecasts blaring from the radio, so I rushed back to PA and my
teaching job. 
Soon after the blizzard hit, a man died in a car accident, and my
father received that man’s heart. However, the State Police closed all the
highways. There could be no returning to Ohio. For three weeks, the transplant
seemed successful, but eventually, my father’s blood became infected, and he
died. For years afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about this stranger’s
heart buried inside my father.
The poem focuses on my father’s blood
infection and the eventual amputations. It was so hard to imagine not only
losing my father, but also thinking of my father—the ultimate people person and
an accomplished photographer (Right)—without his legs and fingers. I have been thinking
about this poem again very recently for several reasons:
•When reading from this collection at a university this past September (Left), I
was quite touched when a student came up to me afterwards, in tears, and
thanked me again and again for the poem. It reminded her of her grandfather and
how her family grieved for him.
•Recently, I have been writing a number of ekphrastic poems, both based on
paintings and on photographs. The latter has again connected me to the role and
mindset of specific photographers, but also to this passion that was my
father’s. In the poem, I try to use images and terminology from the art
world—including the use of fruit and sheets in still lifes—as well as contrast
movement and stasis, life and death. The poem also speaks to the difficulty in
accepting loss—thus the reference to and phenomena of “phantom limbs” after an
amputation.
What
month and year did you start writing this poem? The following —from Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation—was written several years
after my father’s death. The poem gestated for several seasons; I needed to
wait for the initial waves of grief to pass. I needed calm.
How many drafts of this poem did you write
before going to the final? (And can you share a photograph of your rough drafts
with pen markings on it?) I only remember that like all my
poems, this one went through many, many drafts.
Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us? I am sure that there were. I write on a laptop and cut-and-paste a lot. I no longer have some of those early versions.
What
do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? Poetry sometimes gives us a glimpse into moments, sometimes
a glimpse into entire lives. In this case, “Landscape and Still Life” focuses on
both a moment of family grief (when my father’s legs and fingers were amputated
because of a blood infection after his heart transplant) and the long-lasting
grief that has affected our entire lives. We are both still life and landscape;
frozen in one moment of time, as well as part of a larger landscape of
time/mourning. This is how grief is.
Has this poem been published before? And
if so where? “Landscape and Still Life” is part of my newly
released collection Transplant,
Transport, Transubstantiation, which previously won the Yellowglen Prize
and was one of three finalists for the Brittingham and Felix Pollak Book Award.
I attach a photo of the cover. 
and also here
“Passionate, heartfelt documentaries of a life that is full, and filling, and reaching for true purpose.”—Scott Cairns
Reviewed in Anglican Theological Journal "... Perhaps, its Maddox’s own familial losses (her father undergoing a heart transplant) that have primed her for the part of raconteur and medical expositor. In the multi-part poem “Body Parts,” Maddox demonstrates a keen eye for descriptive writing, a poem which ought to find its way into every medical school textbook in the country. Her pinpoint execution, the dance between the purely informational and emotional, sheds new light on old bones. And these are the kind of bones she picks, the kind she buries, the kind she raises from the dead just to bury again, the kind that give us an apercu into the social wares that make up our day-to-day existence..." -Trey Palmisano
Landscape and Still Life
After
the new heart,
when
the blood cultivated its fungus
in
my father's fingers,
then
began its harvest in his legs,
pruning
flesh from the rotting fruit of what we were
once,
we too withered, lost the way to move
in
the moving world.
What
would he photograph now?
we
asked, he who walked miles
to
catch light, in its pedestrian way,
ambling
along childhood footpaths.
When
he focused his lens without fingers,
framed
and balanced each unruly composition,
each
subject sprouting onto film,
how
would his body's landscape separate lights and darks,
begin
again to develop?
Masked
and scrubbed
in
the half-light of intensive-care,
we
study his absences,
the
silhouette of appendages
lost,
phantoms tucked neatly
beneath
the photo-screen of sheets.
Obedient
still-lives, we stay and stay
until
he, too, is gone.
Marjorie Maddox, Sage Graduate Fellow of Cornell University
(MFA) and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University,
has published eleven collections of poetry—including True,
False, None of the Above (Poiema Poetry Series and Illumination
Book Award Bronze Medalist in the Education Category ); Local News from Someplace Else ; Wives'
Tales;
Transplant, Transport,
Transubstantiation (2004
Yellowglen Prize; re-release Wipf & Stock 2018); and Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award)—the short story collection What
She Was Saying (Fomite Press); and over
550 stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies.
The recipient of
numerous honors and co-editor of Common
Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Penn State Press) and assistant editor of Presence, she also is the author of four children’s books, and the
great grandniece of Branch Rickey, the General Manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers,
who helped break the color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson to the Major
Leagues. For more information, please see www.marjoriemaddox.com
Transplant, Transport,
Transubstantiation (2004
Yellowglen Prize; re-release Wipf & Stock 2018); and Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award)—the short story collection What
She Was Saying (Fomite Press); and over
550 stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies. 
BACKSTORY OF THE POEM
LINKS
001 December 29, 2017
Margo
Berdeshevksy’s “12-24”
002 January 08, 2018
Alexis
Rhone Fancher’s “82 Miles From the Beach, We Order The Lobster At Clear Lake
Café”
003 January 12, 2018
Barbara
Crooker’s “Orange”
004 January 22, 2018
Sonia
Saikaley’s “Modern Matsushima”
005 January 29, 2018
Ellen
Foos’s “Side Yard”
006 February 03, 2018
Susan
Sundwall’s “The Ringmaster”
007 February 09, 2018
Leslea
Newman’s “That Night”
008 February 17, 2018
Alexis
Rhone Fancher “June Fairchild Isn’t Dead”
009 February 24, 2018
Charles
Clifford Brooks III “The Gift of the Year With Granny”
010 March 03, 2018
Scott
Thomas Outlar’s “The Natural Reflection of Your Palms”
011 March 10, 2018
Anya
Francesca Jenkins’s “After Diane Beatty’s Photograph “History Abandoned”
012 March 17, 2018
Angela
Narciso Torres’s “What I Learned This Week”
013 March 24, 2018
Jan
Steckel’s “Holiday On ICE”
014 March 31, 2018
Ibrahim
Honjo’s “Colors”
015 April 14, 2018
Marilyn
Kallett’s “Ode to Disappointment”
016 April 27, 2018
Beth
Copeland’s “Reliquary”
017 May 12, 2018
Marlon
L Fick’s “The Swallows of Barcelona”
018 May 25, 2018
Juliet
Cook’s “ARTERIAL DISCOMBOBULATION”
019 June 09, 2018
Alexis
Rhone Fancher’s “Stiletto Killer. . . A Surmise”
020 June 16, 2018
Charles
Rammelkamp’s “At Last I Can Start Suffering”
021 July 05, 2018
Marla
Shaw O’Neill’s “Wind Chimes”
022 July 13, 2018
Julia Gordon-Bramer’s
“Studying Ariel”
023 July 20, 2018
Bill Yarrow’s “Jesus
Zombie”
024 July 27, 2018
Telaina Eriksen’s “Brag
2016”
025 August 01, 2018
Seth Berg’s “It is only
Yourself that Bends – so Wake up!”
026 August 07, 2018
David Herrle’s “Devil In
the Details”
027 August 13, 2018
Gloria Mindock’s “Carmen
Polo, Lady Necklaces, 2017”
028 August 21, 2018
Connie Post’s “Two
Deaths”
029 August 30, 2018
Mary Harwell Sayler’s
“Faces in a Crowd”
030 September 16, 2018
Larry Jaffe’s “The
Risking Point”
031 September 24,
2018
Mark Lee Webb’s “After
We Drove”
032 October 04, 2018
Melissa Studdard’s
“Astral”
033 October 13, 2018
Robert Craven’s “I Have
A Bass Guitar Called Vanessa”
034 October 17, 2018
David Sullivan’s “Paper Mache
Peaches of Heaven”
035 October 23, 2018
Timothy Gager’s
“Sobriety”
036 October 30, 2018
Gary Glauber’s “The
Second Breakfast”
037 November 04, 2018
Heather Forbes-McKeon’s
“Melania’s Deaf Tone Jacket”
038 November 11, 2018
Andrena Zawinski’s
“Women of the Fields”
039 November 00, 2018
Gordon Hilger’s “Poe”
040 November 16, 2018
Rita Quillen’s “My
Children Question Me About Poetry” and “Deathbed Dreams”
041 November 20, 2018
Jonathan Kevin Rice’s
“Dog Sitting”
042 November 22, 2018
Haroldo Barbosa Filho’s
“Mountain”
043 November 27, 2018
Megan Merchant’s “Grief Flowers”
044 November 30, 2018
Jonathan P Taylor’s
“This poem is too neat”
045 December 03, 2018
Ian Haight’s “Sungmyo
for our Dead Father-in-Law”
046 December 06, 2018
Nancy Dafoe’s “Poem in
the Throat”
047 December 11, 2018
Jeffrey Pearson’s “Memorial
Day”
048 December 14, 2018
Frank Paino’s “Laika”
049 December 15, 2018
Jennifer Martelli’s
“Anniversary”
O50 December 19, 2018
Joseph Ross’s “For Gilberto Ramos, 15, Who Died in
the Texas Desert, June 2014”
051 December 23, 2018
“The Persistence of
Music”
by Anatoly Molotkov
052 December 27, 2018
“Under Surveillance”
by Michael Farry
053 December 28, 2018
“Grand Finale”
by Renuka Raghavan
054 December 29, 2018
“Aftermath”
by Gene Barry
055 January 2, 2019
“&”
by Larissa Shmailo
056 January 7, 2019
“The Seamstress:
by Len Kuntz
057 January 10, 2019
"Natural History"
by Camille T Dungy
058 January 11, 2019
“BLOCKADE”
by Brian Burmeister
059 January 12, 2019
“Lost”
by Clint Margrave
060 January 14, 2019
“Menopause”
by Pat Durmon
061 January 19, 2019
“Neptune’s Choir”
by Linda Imbler
062 January 22, 2019
“Views From the
Driveway”
by Amy Barone
063 January 25, 2019
“The heron leaves her
haunts in the marsh”
by Gail Wronsky
064 January 30, 2019
“Shiprock”
by Terry Lucas
065 February 02, 2019
“Summer 1970, The
University of Virginia Opens to Women in the Fall”
by Alarie Tennille
066 February 05, 2019
“At School They Learn
Nouns”
by Patrick Bizzaro
067 February 06, 2019
“I Must Not Breathe”
by Angela Jackson-Brown
068 February 11, 2019
“Lunch on City Island,
Early June”
by Christine Potter
069 February 12, 2019
“Singing”
by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum
070 February 14, 2019
“Daily Commute”
by Christopher P. Locke
071 February 18, 2019
“How Silent The Trees”
by Wyn Cooper
072 February 20, 2019
“A New Psalm
of Montreal”
by Sheenagh Pugh
073 February 23, 2019
“Make Me A
Butterfly”
by Amy Barbera
074 February 26, 2019
“Anthem”
by Sandy Coomer
075 March 4, 2019
“Shape of a Violin”
by Kelly Powell
076 March 5, 2019
“Inward Oracle”
by J.P. Dancing Bear
077 March 7, 2019
“I Broke
My Bust Of Jesus”
by Susan Sundwall
078 March 9, 2019
“My Mother
at 19”
by John Guzlowski
079 March 10, 2019
“Paddling”
by Chera Hammons Miller
080 March 12, 2019
“Of Water
and Echo”
by Gillian Cummings
081 082
083 March 14, 2019
“Little
Political Sense” “Crossing Kansas with
Jim
Morrison” “The Land of Sky and Blue Waters”
by Dr. Lindsey
Martin-Bowen
084 March 15, 2019
“A Tune To
Remember”
by Anna Evans
085 March 19, 2019
“At the
End of Time (Wish You Were Here)
by Jeannine Hall Gailey
086 March 20, 2019
“Garden of
Gethsemane”
by Marletta Hemphill
087 March 21, 2019
“Letters
From a War”
by Chelsea Dingman
088 March 26, 2019
“HAT”
by Bob Heman
089 March 27, 2019
“Clay for
the Potter”
by Belinda Bourgeois
#090 March 30, 2019
“The Pose”
by John Hicks
#091 April 2, 2019
“Last
Night at the Wursthaus”
by Doug Holder
#092 April 4, 2019
“Original
Sin”
by Diane Lockward
#093 April 5, 2019
“A Father
Calls to his child on liveleak”
by Stephen Byrne
#094 April 8, 2019
“XX”
by Marc Zegans
#095 April 12, 2019
“Landscape
and Still Life”
by Marjorie Maddox
