“I think the brevity of poems — or at least mine! — is part of what makes them excellent containers for trauma. You know that however deep into a hole you have to go, you’ll be out of it soon.“
Content warning: sexual violence
She Confessed What You Did
twenty years later—
told me she said no
again and again, told me
you didn’t listen.
And look at you
posting engagement pics,
look at you smiling
with your wife and kids,
your brightly tinted
life in pixels—
she confessed to me
she likes them.
Likes as in clicks
on an icon of a heart
or a blue fist, to show you
how okay she is.
She isn’t.
It makes her shake
two decades later
just to speak it.
Don’t you dare forget—
you
with your bride-to-be,
lifting her hand
to show us the ring—
you
with your cute son
in a matching sweater
in a field of pumpkins—
This wonderfully written piece talks about an extremely painful event but also about the need for the experience to be kept hidden for a very long time. We have access to many forms of art; what features of poetry do you think enable us to process and convey painful and/or complex issues particularly well?
I’ve always been amazed at how, when I write a poem about something painful, it’s as if the pain is siphoned out of me through the pen. Not entirely, of course, but enough: the poem overlays my memory of the event and changes my experience of it. It’s alchemy. I didn’t start submitting poetry for publication until I turned forty, but it’s been good medicine since I was ten.
I think the brevity of poems — or at least mine! — is part of what makes them excellent containers for trauma. You know that however deep into a hole you have to go, you’ll be out of it soon. And a poem can hold so much in so little room. It’s comforting to confine something to the bounds of a poem; it makes me feel like I’m in control, when I’m actually hurtling through space on a spinning, wobbling rock.
The protagonists are not named in this work, and I am not referring to notions of privacy here, rather we are not presented with any form of identity. How do you imagine this anonymity works on the reader?
I wrote this poem to process — and about the process of processing — something I learned had been done to a friend by another friend from high school (both of whom I was very close to), but I hope it can hold more than that. I hope keeping specifics out of the poem increases the likelihood that the reader will feel the “you” in it personally — the reader who has done this to someone. When the word appears on a single line, I am pointing my finger, saying “yes, YOU. YOU.”
The revelation that brought me to the page was compounded by having previously learned of this happening to another friend by another friend from high school (which I suppose shouldn’t be shocking — only one in five rapes are committed by strangers). This poem is an indictment of both of these men, of all of these men smiling on social media holding babies, posting feminist memes. I want to bring the reality of what they did — and its ongoing effects — into the light of their full awareness. To shame them, yes, but also in the hope that it could affect the actions of the next generation of men. The one they’re now raising.
In the first draft of this poem, the ending was “you / with your cute son // in a matching sweater / in a field of pumpkins— // Teach him to be / a better man than you.” I cut the last stanza because it felt didactic and, as Keats is always whispering in my ear, “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.” I hope the revised ending allows the reader to participate more, to take away what they take away without me imposing my will on them. And the next generation still appears in the poem in that cute son, in that field of pumpkins. It also felt right to end this poem with an em dash. Sometimes a period feels too neat. Some things can’t really end.
I love how your poem looks on the page. The short lines and couplets made me read in a clipped, breathy way, with stanzas slightly fragmented from each other in my mind. This mirrors my idea of anxiety trapped inside a body. Did you first consider your content before deciding how to present the material, or did you have a pre-defined form with which to structure your content?
The poem came out in this form in one rush, without conscious intention. It was strange because, at the time, my default form was the sonnet: I’d fallen madly in love with them and after a while, even if I didn’t set out to write one, I’d go back and find I’d written fourteen lines, most of which were ten syllables. Sonnets can seep into your blood like that.
But this poem was written in a rage that couldn’t be contained in neat lines, that couldn’t take a full breath. The kind of rage that makes you physically shake, as the very air seemed to when my friend told me what had happened, what she’d held in her body for twenty years. I think I was unconsciously channelling the manner in which she told me, the clipped confession of a crime she didn’t commit. Short ‘e’s and ‘i’s, short lines, short breaths.
Alice White
Alice White (she/her) is an American poet who lives in rural France. She has received support through Hawthornden and Brooklyn Poets fellowships and her poetry has appeared in berlin lit, Best New Poets, The London Magazine, Mslexia, The Poetry Review, The Rialto, and The Threepenny Review.
How I Write a Poem is our bi-monthly interview series digging in to the nitty-gritty of poetry writing. Explore the full series here.