If a child was a poem,
it would write itself.
It would
write itself out of you
through a roar
deep as the river
Styx, it would
pass through
your hallucinations
of faces, people who seemed
familiar
and perhaps were,
telling you something
you could almost hear;
that forest of pale birches
in snow,
a flash of red
between branches;
a weathered wooden dock,
and dark waves, Pacific
in their strength,
lapping its edges
in moonlight.
You saw each of these things
several times,
then you entered a pain
that changed you
the way an artist models clay,
or a climber reports a stillness
in the deepest fear, a fierce
precision, unroped,
pressed in granite.
At the end of it you had a child,
naked and quiet
against your damp breast.
Death had left the room again.
Your raw nerves surged—
if that child had been a poem,
you would have held it for two years
and watched it take off running.
Instead, you held the child.
When your lap was free,
poetry crept back up
like a cat, looking
for the story.
Jamella Hagen is a writer who lives in Whitehorse, Yukon.
Questions and Answers
As a published writer, what are your tips or words of motivation for the aspiring poet?
Remember that anyone can become a writer. If you don’t see a lot of writers who live where you live or who write about what you write about, then the world probably needs your work even more. If you want to write, you should write!
The other tip I have is that writing might seem like a solitary activity, but most literature is supported through mentorship and community, so I strongly advise that aspiring writers firstly, read as much as possible, and secondly, take classes, volunteer for literary events, attend literary events, create a writers’ group, etc. Find other aspiring writers, and build a network to support each other! It’s more fun, and it really works.
What inspired or motivated you to write this poem?
When I had a baby, I felt two things very strongly. The first was that in the hours of giving birth, I felt closer to death than I’ve ever felt. My experience of having a baby was particularly hard, but I actually went into a headspace I’ve never entered before or since, where, how can I put it, it felt like the door to the underworld/otherworld/whatever “the other side” might be, was standing open, and that my body had a physical knowledge of this. The room I was in dimmed in my awareness, and I saw images flashing in front of me, like vivid dreams, semi-hallucinations, and those are the images this poem was built around.
The second thing that I felt when giving birth was a huge surge of love and energy that carries me creatively to this day. So those twinned things—the near-death feeling of it all plus the incredible rush of energy, made me think, why is there not more literature about giving birth, or if there is, why have I not read it? Also, it occurred to me that many female writers scrub the experience of giving birth out of their writing, for fear of it being too personal or not relatable to male readers, readers who haven’t given birth themselves, etc. But I can’t stop thinking about how historically, the biggest risk to young men was war, and the biggest risk to young women was childbirth, and yet we have a massive literature of war that probes its harrowing and heroic depths, but, it seems to me, a much smaller literature about the actual experience of childbirth. The closest I’ve come to the feeling of giving birth in regular life, in terms of intensity, is mountaineering/rock climbing, so that’s where the image of the climber in the poem comes from. Transition is a medical term for the most intense part of active labour, and of course it can also be a synonym for metamorphosis or change.
Finally, I think a lot of recent books like Between Interruptions, Motherhood, Department of Speculation, and the just published Good Mom on Paper, have described at length how there is often a challenge, especially in the early years, for parents and particularly mothers to balance the demands of parenting with the demands of a professional creative career. In my own life, there has been a pretty long gap between my first book and the book manuscript I have out now for consideration with a publisher, so I wanted to address that too, in this poem, and my choice to focus my creative energy on parenting my child until he started to venture out on his own, at which time the writing came back.
How did your writing process unfold around this poem? How did you write, edit, and refine it?
I first wrote this poem when I had the opportunity to share a local writing residency with a poet friend of mine, Clea Roberts. Clea had a residency at the Jenni House in Whitehorse, and there were some times she couldn’t be in the workspace, so she offered to share it with me, and we had a conversation about writing poems about motherhood. At the time, I was teaching part-time, and parenting a toddler, so I would leave my son with his dad for an evening, and I’d bike down to the Jenni House, which is an old, Gold-rush-era cabin beside the Yukon river. I’d turn on the heat, sit in the chair, and spend about an hour reading poetry and staring at the river. Then I’d write for about three hours, and go home to put my son to bed. Because of the demands of my working and parenting life at that time, I hadn’t written poetry in a few months, and I drafted one new poem each day in the five days I spent at Jenni House that week. It really showed me how scheduled time and a quiet space to work are important for creative productivity.
After I wrote the poem, I sent it to a couple of writer friends, got some feedback, and revised it a couple of times. I think I adjusted the opening, I played with punctuation (taking it out, putting it back in. . . ultimately I decided to punctuate it fairly rigorously after initially writing it with very little punctuation). I tightened the middle stanzas syntactically, played with some line breaks, and revised the ending. This is all pretty standard for my poetry writing practice. I usually write the initial draft of a poem over two to three writing sessions, then revise a little myself, then send it to friends or my writers’ group for feedback, then revise again, then submit to journals, and then hopefully collect into a book. This one’s in my new manuscript that’s out for consideration right now.