“Perhaps that’s what this poem is about: the many-dimensional reality in which we live as adults as opposed to the constraints of a childhood in which we are operating on different brain wave lengths.”
Drawing, 1988
Four odd-sized mullioned windows
two small semi-circular front gardens
one trailed rose around the cottage door
flanked by hanging baskets in full bloom –
I lost this drawing until I was forty.
When my dad returned it to me,
it was identical to the home we’d bought
down to the pond we dug,
the rocks we barrowed up the hill
to place around its circumference,
the potato bed, the wizened wisteria
coaxed up the west-facing wall.
Now, when I walk into my home
I pretend I’m walking into the picture
through a door I’ve cut out
with a pair of green safety scissors
and am shocked to find a family inside.
This is very well-observed narrative poem. What elements are essential do you think for a great narrative poem?
Thank you. Perhaps because I’ve worked more predominantly as a prose stylist and have returned to writing poetry only relatively recently this storytelling element is evident in much of the poetry I write.
I studied the book Story by Robert McKee very closely when I was writing my novel; that book on structuring scripts for the screen is actually useful for writers of all genres and I’m sure some of that learning is at play here in this poem.
For a narrative poem to work well, as a practitioner I think I’m aspiring to take the reader on a journey of some sort. So, a great narrative should perhaps have a beginning, middle and end: but that end doesn’t need to close the poem down, it can also open the poem up, as I hope this one does. A great narrative poem, like all poetry, should leave the reader changed somehow when they finish reading it, even if just on a cellular level. This poem doesn’t end where you expect it to, and that act of confounding or subverting the reader’s expectations is one way to construct a strong narrative and I hope that I leave the reader with some new reflection on life to consider. Lastly, I think a great narrative poem brings something to life in the telling of that story. In this poem, the people who populate it become animated even though they are drawn with a childish hand.
You sent two images along with the poem – one a child’s sketch. Is this the drawing that inspired the poem, how did you come upon it again, and how did the poem develop?
Yes, this drawing of a cottage which I did in 1988 inspired the poem; I have a deep-rooted somatic memory of sitting at my Dad’s dining table making it when I would have been aged nine years-old. I can remember it viscerally. This was a very intentional drawing, and it is an archetypal kind of dwelling. My Dad kept most of the pictures I drew as a child and he returned this one to me when he was having a de-clutter.
What haunted me when I was reunited with the drawing as an adult was that it was indeed pretty much a carbon copy of the house we bought in mid-Wales in 2012, even down to the irregular size of the windows, the colour of the front door and – spookily – some of the modifications we made. For example, the pond we dug, and the wisteria which now hugs the south side of the cottage.
For a while, I had this drawing in a frame and it hung on my office wall but the felt-tip pen began to fade. In an earlier iteration of the poem there was quite a didactic tone which, a poetry editor friend astutely fed back to me, was like the poet’s pen was coming into the poem to point at what I wanted the reader to feel. One of the stages I go through now when I am re-drafting thanks to her feedback is to be alive to my inclination to tell. I try, in the redrafting process, to get out of the way as much as I can as a poet and let the images speak for themselves.
Originally, these were the closing two stanzas. I think the poem reads far better without them: so often less is more!
The picture once hung in my office,
but sun’s erasing the wispy clouds,
the childish chimney smoke,
and I should take it down, but –
before I do – I wanted to leave you with this:
know that we possess the power to wish
ourselves into existence, to draw our future selves into being.
Narrative voice is important here. Has the narrator found their childhood dream come to life? Does the shock at the end suggest a wish to return to childhood? Could you talk a bit about how you use voice?
Yes, I do think that I was trying to communicate that the narrator has found their childhood dream had come to life. The drawing was a two-dimensional dream and perhaps that’s what this poem is about: the many-dimensional reality in which we live as adults as opposed to the constraints of a childhood in which we are operating on different brain wave lengths, and not yet in the full multi-dimensional personhood of an adult self.
I used to make advent calendars as a child at Christmas. I think I was fascinated by doors as thresholds of experience. I realise in retrospect that this poem was probably influenced by Tottie by Rumer Godden which was televised in the 1980s as a stop-frame animation series for children whereby a girl played with dolls who came alive within the doll’s house. The narrative voice here also reminds me a bit of the Tiger Who Came to Tea now that I read it back; perhaps that was also an unconscious influence. There is a shopping list element to the first stanza, although the language isn’t childish in the poem: ‘mullioned’ ‘circumference’ and ‘wizened’ are not in a child’s register; there is that interplay between an adult’s and a child’s vocabulary in the poem.
As I am moving towards completing my first collection, I’m starting to understand the territory I’m concerned with. I think it is that liminal space between adulthood and childhood, and recognising the child within each adult, too. Perhaps it’s no surprise, as my children are now teenagers and on that threshold experience themselves so maybe that’s what this poem is also about – that intergenerational moment of becoming a mother, from the point of view of our inner child?
With voice, I use internal rhyme and assonance to create word landscapes inside the world of each poem, and of course I think carefully about the placement of words from the point of view of sound, metre but also texture and even how it appears on the page: I love a broad alphabet in my poetry! Looking over it again now, there is a sense of the pastoral but it is a relatively straight forward poem and direct in terms of the voice.
Objects as well as verbs can take on talismanic power in our writing and have the potential to become the engine room of feeling. Perhaps for me the standout object in this poem is the pair of ‘green safety scissors’ – they are a literal short cut to that landscape of childhood in that they at once have the potential to cut, but they are really blunt. That is so often the dilemma of childhood – we want to be grown up, but we aren’t yet given that legitimacy. So, yes, perhaps there is a sense of longing here then, too: do we sometimes as adults desire to return to the innocence of childhood and blunt scissors?
Julia Forster
Julia Forster (she/her) is a poet and author based near Machynlleth. She has published fiction, What a Way to Go (Atlantic Books, 2016) and non-fiction, Muses (Oldcastle Books, 2007). Her poetry has appeared in bath magg, Fish Poetry Anthology 2022, New Welsh Review, Poetry Wales and The Telegraph.
Photo credit: Heledd Wyn Hardy
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