Intro
Welcome to the Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt, where every week I read you an original poem and then we talk about its key technique. This season, you’ll hear poems from my book Noctis Terrores.
Today you’ll hear “Lavender Soap”, and we’ll talk about how to talk about tough topics. Explicit label: This poem deals with sexual abuse. Here’s…
Lavender Soap
–for T.S.
It isn’t enough to pray for daylight, sweating,
on the sheets where he’s pinned you again,
your legs skinny as dead birds and purple
with fingertip bruises. Your sister pants
in her shallow sleep. Sometimes he pulls
the twin beds together. Think of Pompeii.
Frozen bodies, pinned to their shadows
in the ecstasy of death. Ecstasy:
forgetting oneself. Seized by the god.
This thing inside your father stumbling
out of the dark, a ghost smelling
of your mother’s handmade soap. Years later,
the scent of lavender will take you back
to your teeth marks on the pillow case.
Discuss:
My buddy Joel Ying teaches storytelling at Florida Gulf Coast University, and he talks about the difference between stories as therapy and stories as art. Sometimes we’re telling a story because we need to unburden ourselves, whether it’s about our own experience or someone else’s, but we’re still in the pain of it. We haven’t reached the other side, that moment of grace or forgiveness or aha or What’s next?
Poetry can be that way too. A lot of online and performance poetry is really shared trauma bonding. It’s directed at an audience that’s gone through something similar. To become full-fledged art, to reach an audience broader than just people who have suffered in the same ways as the poet or the character or the speaker, it needs to be repackaged for public consumption.
What’s the gift to the audience in it? How does it rise above the individual and into the group? There are a few ways I’m trying to do that in this one.
One is staying with sensory details. There aren’t a lot of statements in this poem. I am sticking with consistent and tough imagery: “dead birds”, “bruises”, “twisted bodies”, “shallow sleep”. The temptation when writing about something horrible is to say how horrible it is, but I want to keep you in the moment so that you, as the reader or the listener, intuitively know how awful it is without me having to say it. I want to, unfortunately and with apology, fire up your mirror neurons so your nervous system thinks that this is real.
Two, I’m creating intellectual distance through those Greek and Roman references. There’s something about the comparison to Pompeii and the dictionary definition from the Greeks–that original Greek idea of being seized–that I hope elevates the experience. It’s been made bigger than one or two people suffering and set into history.
And three, I’m trying to stay true in the content to the experience of early abuse. We don’t always get to the other side of it. For kids who go through sexual abuse–which is 1 in 9 girls and 1 in 20 boys according to RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network–you can make it out and still get these flashbacks decades later. So we still have those “teeth marks on the pillowcase” at the end of the poem, and they’re presented as an image rather than a statement. So I’m letting you make the conclusion about them, again, without me telling you how awful it is.
The “you” of this poem has made it out and is an adult and still has some tough times, some tough memories, and I think that’s okay because it’s delivered without pity and without labels. It’s just described. It’s just what it is. For survivors, sometimes being able to notice the reactions without going into the triggers, without drowning in them, is itself a win, is itself a kind of making it through. So I want to include that in the poem’s content and let you feel that without making a big statement about it.
If you’ve listened to other episodes, you know that I prefer to lean into imagery rather than statement, no matter what the topic is. But it’s especially helpful with tough topics, where our tendency might be to make a lot of labels or a lot of claims and statements because we want to make sure the audience understands the badness of it. If we can appropriately create the imagery and appropriately create the emotional tone of the piece, the audience is going to know.
So let’s hear “Lavender Soap” one more time, and listen for the ways I’m trying to approach this very difficult topic. How do you notice me trying to make it art rather than therapy? Here’s…
Lavender Soap
–for T.S.
It isn’t enough to pray for daylight, sweating,
on the sheets where he’s pinned you again,
your legs skinny as dead birds and purple
with fingertip bruises. Your sister pants
in her shallow sleep. Sometimes he pulls
the twin beds together. Think of Pompeii.
Frozen bodies, pinned to their shadows
in the ecstasy of death. Ecstasy:
forgetting oneself. Seized by the god.
This thing inside your father stumbling
out of the dark, a ghost smelling
of your mother’s handmade soap. Years later,
the scent of lavender will take you back
to your teeth marks on the pillow case.
Prompt
If you’re writing along with me, let technique help you give voice to a tough topic. Write a poem that moves beyond suffering or beyond anxiety, beyond loss, into something more, into What’s next? Find a way to claim the power through this telling.
You could use a variety of techniques here.
- You could give yourself a set number of syllables per line–lately, I really like 10 syllables–and stick to that throughout the poem.
- You could focus on sensory details and shoot for a ratio of 70% imagery to 30% statement.
- You might play with a certain number of stanzas, of lines per stanza, a repeated phrase that you weave in throughout the poem.
Whatever technique or form you choose, let that keep you in the realm of art rather than therapy and see what you create. It’s your story now.
Outro
Thanks so much for listening to the Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt. This season, I’m reading poems from my book Noctis Terrores. It’s available now on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major online booksellers, and there’s a link in the episode description. You can support the show by picking up a copy.
I’ll see you next week.