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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.
#75 Backstory of the
Poem “Shape of a Violin”
by Kelly Powell
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? To
begin at the beginning, (of this poem) I conceived this poem at my computer at
home in or around 2007 while my child was attending an after school program.
I
had started to leave myself one half an hour a day leeway to allow for traffic
and to dedicate to writing. The poem is about my child’s love of the violin at
that time and all the lessons and bringing the violin (we ended up with two)
back and forth between two blended families. At the time I was restoring a baby
grand piano that I adopted from a neighbor who was moving. The piano had a
French polish that someone had ruined by cleaning it with Windex, so it appeared
to be ruined. 
We
lived in a small house, just the two of us sparrows in a nest, I like to think
of us at that time. I was a single mom, working as a bookkeeper for an
accountant, as I had done in different industries my whole life. The car
business, mortgage business and supermarket, etc.
I have written poems from
these experiences also. Probably from the beginning my child had been angry
that we had moved and would’ve started a year earlier in 3rd grade.
Discipline in practice didn’t lead to a love of the instrument, however, but
the knowledge and love of music remained. We switched to guitar and mandolin
later.
Where were you when you
started to actually write the poem? And
please describe the place in great detail.
To begin at the beginning, (of this
poem) I conceived this poem at my computer at home in or around 2007 while my
child was attending an after school program.
What month and year did
you start writing this poem? The Year 2007
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
may have gone through a hundred drafts of this poem from beginning until now.
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 workshopped a lengthy draft of this poem at the Walt
Whitman Birthplace with XJ Kennedy in 2009 , where they have a Master Class
every year with a famous poet.
I originally had a lot of explanation and
language in the beginning of this, but at his suggestion, cut all that
introductory and explanatory exposition and this was key to its transformation. This might have amounted to journaling about my feelings at the time of writing
the original and I had tried my whole life to write longer poems, as one of my
early teachers had said my poems wound down like a top.
I also changed the form
at that point to a Concrete Poem, in which the form of the poem resembles the
subject of the poem or is connected in some way. The child in the poem is now 22
(from 13). Sometimes I would only change one word a year. 
The end comes from
the style of Stephen Crane, one of my first loves as a writer of prose or
poetry, where there is a melodramatic, philosophical twist almost one of
anguish, at the end whether the poem is short or long. I just changed something
from reading this article where I felt there was a transposition in the line
‘unlikely will be as fortunate as the boy in the Sudan’ but I like it both
ways. In the final version of the poem it falls on two pages in the book
version, losing some of the Concrete Poem form. But the choice was to choose a
smaller font than the rest of the book as a whole. Poems sometimes have become
so small on the page that they are more difficult to read or understand. Having
worn glasses my whole life I am very sensitive to the struggle of reading with
a handicap of a kind.
What
do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? What
I would like readers to take from this poem is a sense of life being a
sculpture (https://collabcubed.com), and
that the competition that we go through of whether someone is busier or hurting
more or less is only understandable from our own experience and that you can
have compassion for someone with a shared experience just by being a
compassionate human being. That it is a process we are all going through and we
all come from the same place and are going to the same place through our
connection to the divine.
Has this poem been published before? And if so where? ). I have only just
had this poem published in my collected works, Posthumously Yours, from Local Gems Press.
The Shape of a Violin
My now 13 year old
complained we didn’t have
cable the entire
year I couldn’t
afford it. A source of
suffering, point of defiance.
I explained
our priorities—
the roof above us, our
hearts, minds, the suffering of others.
everything else becomes things of
history. I told him directly, showed him
through allegory and prayer. Never mentioned
the boy in the Sudan who wants to play violin.
unlikely will be as fortunate as this child—
even with twenty minutes of assigned,
determined practice each night on an
instrument he chose, but hasn’t
learned to love. Never watches—
the sunlight touch the space
where it opens to the air—
on either side of its strings. Subtle
breaks in the wood that allow its music
to leave in silent curves. Neither would he
recognize its shape through the waxy coat like
the artisan who chose a difficult French
polish—
instead of a quick, light varnish. Who rubbed
and rubbed shellac into the wood, the shape of
it
entering its pores the way a Japanese monk
rubs
the black away from his bowl to reveal its red
color beneath. Same way we each have our
own pain and caress it until
it becomes our own.
Kelly J. Powell is a poet
native to Long Island. She is a graduate of the Literature and Rhetoric Program
at SUNY Binghamton. She has been published and performed widely on Long Island
and New York City. She has worked mostly as a bookkeeper in a variety of
industries to support her ever-growing Poetry and Activism.
She is the proud
mother of a graduate of SUNY Stonybrook, Double Major, Honor Student. Longtime
host of POETS ALOUD at bj spoke gallery
in Huntington, now in its 8th year!!…and now an empty nester,
she had time to finish this book!!!! Posthumously
Yours coming soon to a theater (or library) near you. *Contact Kelly Powell via email at skellybean1966@gmail.com.
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
