Decluttering
The instructions are clear - hold each possession in your hands; if it does not render joy, remove it from your life. So I'm keeping the dog, though at eighty pounds she wasn't easy to pick up, much less hold, and not at all joyful herself; I think she'd happily have tossed my sweaty, grunting, human self out of her life. But that would be another poem. You? You're a different story altogether - and here's the problem: how many times have I put you out with the trash, dumped you into the recycling bin with the newspapers, empty jug of Tide, the wine bottles, only to find myself, once again at the curb, rooting through rubbish to find you, bring you back inside where, it has suddenly become clear to me, you belong? In "April," Garnet deals with the return of her prodigal daughter. Tommie. The second stanza of "Decluttering" seemed to me a good fit for the mixed feelings that ensue on both sides in this second chapter of An Invitation to the Party. However, when I actually wrote the poem in 2016, Marie Kondo's book, Spark Joy, had recently been published and was getting lots of media attention. I read the reviews but, I confess, not the book. I have a neat and tidy streak a mile wide, which is not necessarily a good thing, and I am not looking for ways to encourage it. Mostly, I loved the image of the "hold it in your hands and if it does not spark joy, get rid of it" for all the ways I could co-opt it. Kondo was referring to "stuff." What if I applied it to the living. Like the dog. What about the dog? And how would the dog feel about such a process? Well, that took care of stanza one. But the poem hits its stride in stanza two, when we leave the disgruntled dog and move on to our own famously messy, chaotic human relationships, in which being of two minds about someone is more common than you might think, and multiple iterations of changing one's mind so common as to be unremarkable. Look at all the people who have married and divorced the same person more than once. The recycling bin seemed the ideal metaphor for this idea. The last line was a gift. I was typing, "bring you back inside," when my fingers found, "where, it has suddenly become clear to me, you belong?" on the keyboard, and I allowed them to finish the poem (and turn it into a kind of love story). Only poetry has the ability to take an idea for a 300-page novel and distill it into twelve lines. Practical magic (with a nod to Alice Hoffman) indeed.
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We tend to write about what we know. I am a writer, thus this blog: Why write? What, when, where to write? Stay tuned. Archives
April 2024
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