Jessica
Failure
Blameless Mouth began as a failed poem.
While in graduate school, I tried to write a poem in which I explored my childhood relationship with consuming media with my adult desire for consuming precious and disposable objects. I was inspired, oddly enough, by my frequent trips to the Mall of America, where I often pressed my nose against the store windows, but never felt that I could fully satisfy my needs by buying more things. The poem failed, because I had found a topic much larger than the confines of a single poem.
In my creative mind, I knew that my childhood experience and my adult behaviors were connected by a single root cause. I began to name it hunger. Hunger felt like the right word, a heavy enough word, with enough personal and cultural connotations to serve as a touchstone for this vague sense of rapacity that I was trying to capture in a single poem.
After drafting and redrafting this poem dozens of times, I realized that I needed more space so I wrote more poems about the same theme. I pulled in my own memories around food and eating with my family, and tried to connect it to my consumption of media as a kid. That didn’t quite work. Then, I tried to tackle the ideas by writing about my adult relationship with food and eating, and connected that to my desire for owning more things. That almost worked, but not quite. The longer that I wrote, I pulled in the stories I remember reading as a child about starving children and hungry women, like Hansel and Gretel, Perspehone, Eve and others. I started to explore my childhood experiences with loss and wanting, despite having a relatively safe and affluent upbringing. It was then that the poems started to feel interconnected.
At this point, I felt like I was on to something big. I had the sense that I had an interconnected theme that I was exploring, but I didn’t quite know how it would turn out. Little did I know that I would spend the next two years trying to write and rewrite this one failed poem into a larger manuscript.
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Next Monday, I’ll continue my thoughts on how Blameless Mouth became a manuscript. Stay tuned!
If you want to stay connected to my progress with bringing Blameless Mouth to publication, I hope that you will join the Blameless Mouth Facebook page.
