Friday, March 15, 2019

#84 Backstory of the Poem "A Tune To Remember" by Anna Evans





*The images in this specific piece are granted copyright privilege by:  Public Domain, CCSAL, GNU Free Documentation Licenses, Fair Use Under The United States Copyright Law, or given copyright privilege by the copyright holder which is identified beneath the individual photo.

**Some of the links will have to be copied and then posted in your search engine in order to pull up properly

*** The CRC Blog welcomes submissions from published and unpublished poets for BACKSTORY OF THE POEM series.  Contact CRC Blog via email at caccoop@aol.com or personal Facebook messaging at https://www.facebook.com/car.cooper.7

***This is the eighty-fourth 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. 

#84 Backstory of the Poem
“A Tune To Remember”
by Anna Evans
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? 
I was in the process of creating a manuscript with the design of examining my mother’s death through the lens of the Titanic disaster. My mom was christened Rosemary but everyone called her Rosie.  
My primary research was to read “A Night to Remember,” Walter Lord’s 1955 classic book about the sinking. I had made notes of various stories that I wanted to write about in the book, which knits together the accounts of many survivors. 
I was particularly drawn to anything that was unusual or went against the cliches we believe to be true. Everyone knows that the band went down with the ship, and everyone THINKS they know that the band was playing “Nearer My God to Thee.” However, survivors’ accounts differ greatly. Some think that “Nearer My God to Thee” was the last tune they heard; others named another tune, “Autumn,” (which became the working title of my poem); and some said it was a song they’d never heard before.  This idea gave me the title, “A Tune to Remember,” which is ironic because people DIDN’T really remember, and of course it plays off the title of Lord’s book. 
The poem is also the second in the book about the band. The first poem is called “And the Band Was Playing Ragtime” and it’s a sonnet, so this one needed to be a sonnet too, for symmetry. I don’t remember much about composing the poem, because I tend to write them in a “sonnet trance.” I think it sprang pretty much fully-formed from the keyboard.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem?  And please describe the place in great detail. I was at one of my favorite places in the world, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Specifically, I was in my studio, which I loved, sitting at the main desk. 
One of the walls was covered with a cork board, and I had pinned printouts of all the other poems in the manuscript to it in a rough order. I could see the hole where this one would fit, next to “And the Band Was Playing Ragtime.”
What month and year did you start writing this poem? July 2016
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?)
Maybe 2 max, and the second wouldn’t have been much different than the first. 
Maybe a word or two. I type the poems, so there’s nothing available to show the workings.
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? Nope. I probably added the epigraph, for clarification.


What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? Two things. Firstly, that our memories play tricks on us and that two people may remember the same event very differently, particularly when it’s a traumatic event.  
This was true of my mother’s death also. When my father and I compared notes after, it was disconcerting how many details we disagreed upon. Secondly, that  once in a lifetime events provoke unique and sometimes unreplicable responses.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? The seventh line talks about the “last song.” My mother’s illness and death was full of “lasts’ for her and for me. The emotional power of that word “last” can be quite raw.
Has this poem been published before?  And if so where? Yes! It’s been well-received. It was a finalist for the Howard Nemerov sonnet contest.
It was published in one of the last issues of Measure http://www.measurepress.com/measure/


Then my book came out in April, and this was the poem from it that was picked up by Verse Daily. 
A Tune to Remember 
        The Legend is, of course, that the band went down 
        playing "Nearer My God to Thee." 
                — Walter Lord, A Night to Remember 

Now that the boats have been lowered to the sea,
now that the lights have failed, and a deeper chill
sets in among those remaining, the melody
starts to sound frivolous in a night so still,
so full of portent. Song sheets lit by stars,
Hartley flips through, finds nothing with the power
to be the last song, the one listed in memoirs
by the exclusive survivors of this hour.

And so he plays—by instinct or by ear—
something that sounds a little like a hymn
that he doesn't quite recall. The bandsmen hear
and by some miracle they all join in,
a tune never played before or heard again—
that unique night's unnamable refrain.



Anna M. Evans’ poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. 
She gained her MFA from Bennington College. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists' Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers' Choice Award, she currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Rowan College at Burlington County. 
Her new 
collection, Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic, is out now from Able Muse Press, and her sonnet collection, Sisters & Courtesans, is available from White Violet Press.
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

No comments:

Post a Comment