Wild Women Write Poetry

Julia Thacker

    I was in the airport again, running for the gate to catch the first thing smoking – flying – from Boston to Dayton, Ohio. My father had fallen again, had been rushed by ambulance from his assisted living facility to hospital. Our troubled past hardly mattered. He was helpless. I was next of kin and in charge. As a fiction writer, I had long been the keeper of family stories. Now I was the keeper of him. His guardian. His memory. 

     A week earlier, attendants at the bucolically named Hearth and Home had asked me to compile a photo album of key events in Dad’s life to help orient him. I arranged a grid of snapshots, tucked them into tiny paper corners and composed captions, Your ex-wife; At 18 in your Army uniform; You, B.A.R. gunner, Battle of the Bulge; Your ‘57 Chevy flipped on its side after, moonshine-blind, you ran aground of a cornfield. In late middle age, I had become a dutiful daughter. 

     Now, as the plane elevated into cumulus clouds and blue sky, what I really wanted was to be whisked to OZ. To enter a witness protection program. Settled perhaps in the blue woods of Alabama where I would cook over a campfire, learn to identify birdcalls; or Taos where the air was thin and I could soak in mineral baths until my own memory was wiped clean. I wanted to disembark, to flee down the runway, hair on fire, a ball of orange flame. 

     Instead, I began to jot phrases on my boarding pass and all over receipts fished from my purse. I hadn’t written poetry since graduate school, but the images tumbled out of me. I had a title, “Instructions for Caregivers.”  And a first line “In the warehouse of antique fathers, call things by their names.” For isn’t poetry a placeholder, a respite, a diary which holds our secrets, our desires and our anger, a confession booth, if you will, private and holy. 

     In a recent conversation between poets Diane Suess and James Allen Hall at Washington College’s Literary House, Seuss remarked “To love the world is to tell the truth about it…There is something wonderful about rage and the potency of truth telling.” Poetry is a come-as-you- are-party. Show up with janky feelings, muddy hands, frizzy hair full of briars. The poems needn’t be polite or well-behaved. They are lyrics of the body, knocking knees and elbows, sassy and sarcastic. As Seuss reminded the audience, “You don’t have to be anybody’s version of perfect. It’s much more interesting to be real.”

    As an only daughter and eldest child, I learned to maintain composure in crisis. Now, when our plane hit turbulence and the aircraft shimmied, I re-buckled my seatbelt and gathered my scraps and urgent scribblings. One beauty of poetry is its portability. Poetry is based upon the line. We write in faith that the lines will accumulate and take shape.

    That trip, I remained in Dayton for several days until my father was well enough to return to the Memory Care Unit at Hearth and Home. There, we shared meals with other residents in a small hushed dining room. My father had always been moody, locked down, silent. A mystery to me. I began secretly to wish that our tablemate and frequent dinner companion, a retired history teacher with a honeyed voice and snazzy button down was my dad. Why couldn’t I just make the switch. Breeze into the professor’s room, straighten the family pictures on his wall, fold the afghan on back of his recliner. After all, in the Memory Care Unit, who would know? Though in the poem that later resulted from this flight of fancy, even I had to admit it was too late to go shopping for fathers.

     Over the next several months I often flew between Boston and Dayton to attend to my dad, on a first name basis with the employees of a particular Hampton Inn. When I think back on those trips, I remember driving and driving. Bankers to lawyers to strip malls to skilled nursing centers to social workers to the chain restaurants my father enjoyed on his occasional outings. And I continued to write like a woman possessed, on motel stationary, napkins, sticky notes, paper placements from the Red Lobster, often pulling my rental car to the side of the road to dash off the lines I’d composed in my head.

    Coming to terms with an elderly parent’s dwindling days means there is no longer a generation between you and the abyss – or the afterlife, however you imagine it. This reality invites reflection upon your own stretch of days trailing behind, your own lost youth. The one time my father visited me in Cambridge where I spent my twenties among artists and academics, he claimed that my friends and I, decked out in black frocks, black T-shirts, black berets, like so many ravens, always looked like we were going to a funeral. Many years later, on one of those Dayton trips, I began an address to a little black dress – one of the many I had owned – “Wingless, plucked/plumed, aroma of fig pudding, squid ink./Moths have made a feast of you.” A poem that stands as both ode and elegy. 

     On the East Coast, I attended craft seminars, workshops and poetry readings. As my father declined, my writing accumulated. The lines took the shape of poems, the poems settled into sections, and eventually became a full-length collection entitled TO WILDNESS. This precarious final journey with my father made me a poet, a wild woman spinning out and hoarding words, setting fire to the page.

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A finalist for the National Poetry Series, Julia Thacker’s debut collection To Wildness was chosen for the 19th annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize by Paul Muldoon. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, Poetry International, Bennington Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Gulf Coast. Find more at juliathacker.com

TO WILDNESS

To Wildness is winner of the 19th annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, and was chosen by the internationally acclaimed poet, Paul Muldoon. As Joan Houlihan says in her enthusiastic endorsement, “Teeming with image, sensation and sound, the poems in To Wildness tumble us into a glorious exuberance of catalog and character, rural landscape and dark imaginings (‘We ate ants peeled from bark, a rain of plums / when he rattled the trees. Lumbering. Shackled.’). Ancestral voices speak from the grave; fabulist figures like the girl buried with a finch tell their stories; and contemporary ghosts only the narrator sees abound (Let me touch them as they pass.) A southern gothic atmosphere hovers here: shapes twisting in the dark and the language to conjure them near. What a rich and thrilling collection!”

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Category: On Writing