About/ HOW I CAME TO WRITE
"Writing poems teaches me the contours of my own consciousness." —Pamela Harrison
How I Came to Write
Featured Poet Essay
Great River Review, Number 22, April 1993,
Orval Lund, Poetry Editor
Picture a knobby-kneed sixth grader in a sashed dress and sagging anklets gripping both sides of the sweat-stained page as she reads her first poem, about time and a clock, on educational TV in Oklahoma City in 1957. I’m fond of remembering that occasion as my first reading and the official start of my life with poetry. But, in fact, no one thought to save that landmark creation for posterity. Neither did anyone suggest I should write more poems or intimate that I had talent enough to become a poet. In 1957, committing one’s life to poetry was not, even remotely, on the list of possible aspirations for a girl child in my family. My upbringing was directed toward making me a good and virtuous wife for some good and capable man. However, an allegiance to the power of language and the grace of words was nevertheless instilled in me by the examples of my mother and father.
From my father, Lynn, I come by a story-telling tradition that began with his nightly recounting of the adventures of a horse named Red Cloud. By astounding acts of intelligence, loyalty, and courage, Red Cloud saved the skins of a boy and girl amazingly like my brother and me. These bedtime stories graduated into entertaining tales around the dinner table as my father shared dramatic accounts and amusing anecdotes drawn from his childhood in Cortez, Colorado, and also from his varied experiences as a general practitioner in Oklahoma City.
My mother, Vera, was less forthcoming with her stories. One of seven children born to a self-educated dirt farmer who was consulted by his neighbors on difficult mathematical computations and matters of common law, my mother taught herself to read when she was three. She graduated valedictorian of her high school class at the age of sixteen and had to wait tables for two years until she was old enough to enter nursing school—the highest respectable aspiration then available to farm girls from Sparks, Oklahoma.
Vera Alice Pritchett was a free-thinker. She dressed in her big brothers’ clothes and answered only to the name Jimmy. Raised a Southern Baptist, she smoked and drank and played cards. She loathed bigotry of any kind and determined early to speak standard English instead of the thick Oklahoma twang indigenous to those parts. Her success with mainstream dialect was passed on to her children, who can put an Okie accent on and off at will, as a kind of parlor game. However, for our mother, as for Eliza Doolittle, [proper] language was a ticket up and out. To her dying day, Vera had an abiding curiosity about words and their meanings. She never hesitated to look something up in the dictionary or encyclopedia and was a stickler about good grammar and usage. She could and should have been the English teacher I became.
But, for many still largely secret and unfathomed reasons, my mother suffered in later life from a crippling insecurity and introversion. Perhaps it was that she never received the education her intellect deserved. I don’t know. What I do remember most acutely is her great love of words coupled with an almost pathological shyness to articulate her own personal feelings. Under this mixed influence, I grew up sensitized both to the richness of the language and to a charged domestic atmosphere of thoughts unspoken.
Thus, very early in my life, I learned that finding the right word to name what was hidden or unexpressed became a key to emotional deliverance (and a powerful taboo to break). I am convinced, now, that much of my drive toward written expression arose from an essential need to bring my interior consciousness into congruence with professed reality. Ordered language in all its richness and subtlety became the medium for testing and validating secret perceptions, for making accountable the twanging vibrations of my deepest intuition. To this day, I experience right words set in the right order—the careful, written naming of the actual—as having a kind of magnetic pull toward truth.
A confirmed introvert as a teenager, I spent a lot of time in my room hiding behind closed blinds and talking to my mirror. I did have a powerful and charismatic English teacher, Mrs. Margaret Tuck, in whose classes I burned to excel, but my recollection of those years is that they passed largely underground, in deep unconsciousness. The only poem I remember writing, in the pit of some adolescent romantic despair, was entitled “Run, Lethe, Run.” I still have it somewhere.
As an English major at Smith College, I read a great deal of old poetry and wrote a great many scholarly and analytical papers. A friend at Vassar gave me my first volume of contemporary poetry, a copy of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. Though Plath had actually roomed in the dormitory next door to my own, I would never have discovered her then on my own. I remember reading the collection with only passing interest; it was well beyond my experience. When I submitted “Run, Lethe, Run” to the campus literary magazine, it was turned down cold.
After graduation, I taught prep school English in Boston and wrote parodies of Beowulf, Chaucer, and Shakespeare to entertain my students but without any particular commitment. It wasn’t, in fact, until some years later, when I was a young wife, when I had given up teaching high school and had no clear sense of calling, when I had moved to a small town [in Northern New England] and a dilapidated farm where I was lonely and my husband struggled to make a living [as a family practitioner] and we both struggled to deal with our separate and mutual sadness over my reproductive infertility, that, my back against the wall, words began to flow and poems come. In that extremity, poetry came as a gift, a promise of deliverance to inform and express the difficult facts of my adult existence.
I have been struck over and over by the natural eloquence that even the simplest folks can rise to when their words exactly match the tenor of their feeling. Simple eloquence is something I practice toward. Simple eloquence and that music of meaning leaning toward us out of the magical affinities of words. My narratives, long and short, in roughly iambic free verse, recount tales of quirky, small town lives. Lyrics come when, out of great confusion, some saving clarity falls like a pearl to plumb the deepest well of my psyche. The lyrics offer an architecture for mazy interior states of being and, as such, they act as compass and measure for psychic transformation.
Writing poems has been a journey in process, a discipline in precision which was greatly helped at the outset by a neighborhood gathering of poets who workshopped together, and subsequently by my attending various poetry conferences and earning my MFA in writing poetry from Vermont College. The low residency masters program allowed me to take myself and my writing seriously and to move in the exciting and confirming company of those also keenly committed to writing and fine literature while honoring my obligations at home. Importantly too, I made friendships with other poets with whom I still correspond, share work, critiques, and inspiration.
Time, mistakes, much practice, and maturation have wrought many changes in my work and outlook. I am more eclectic now than I used to be, and more humble, more tolerant of a wide range of expression, but I have never doubted my lived and inherited allegiance to the power of language to say it straight; to deliver our deepest, unspoken realities to light; to communicate feeling and thought so powerfully and accurately from one human being to another that it frees us from hegemonies of ignorance and denial. Words matter to me because I have experienced their power to liberate and transform. Though my daily conversation is most often awkward, shallow, and imprecise, the kind of concentration and penetration true poetry achieves—the convergence of my thought and feeling in an image and rhythm of words—delivers me to my truest self. As Robert Frost says in “Mowing”:
Anything more than the the truth would have
seemed too weak...
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
Long before I was a poet, I celebrated telling moments and the power of language in personal letters. Now, though my primary form of journaling is still my letters, I find I could not live without the more rigorous, and selfless, challenge of poetry. My engagement with the language and the effort to make poetry with it has become my way of being, of discovering and integrating what it is I feel and know and don’t know. It is a discipline that opens out to the world in unexpected ways, leading to deeper and wider wells of understanding and feeling.
Writing narrative poems lets me be an archivist, saving from oblivion the stories of my family and others, binding teller and listener together in a shared reverence for different lives and the mutual enjoyment of words well used. My lyric poems mark those moments when the way I thought the world was suddenly breaks into a larger, more perplexing and ambiguous reality. By articulating the actual and the imagined in a music of sound and form, writing poems teaches me the contours of my own consciousness. It demands my fullest emotional and intellectual honesty and my commitment to language as an organ of truth, an instrument of worldly exploration and personal transformation. Words, like stepping stones across a foggy swamp, lead me toward the new ground of my knowing.
—Pamela Harrison (1993)
Featured Poet Essay
Great River Review, Number 22, April 1993,
Orval Lund, Poetry Editor
Picture a knobby-kneed sixth grader in a sashed dress and sagging anklets gripping both sides of the sweat-stained page as she reads her first poem, about time and a clock, on educational TV in Oklahoma City in 1957. I’m fond of remembering that occasion as my first reading and the official start of my life with poetry. But, in fact, no one thought to save that landmark creation for posterity. Neither did anyone suggest I should write more poems or intimate that I had talent enough to become a poet. In 1957, committing one’s life to poetry was not, even remotely, on the list of possible aspirations for a girl child in my family. My upbringing was directed toward making me a good and virtuous wife for some good and capable man. However, an allegiance to the power of language and the grace of words was nevertheless instilled in me by the examples of my mother and father.
From my father, Lynn, I come by a story-telling tradition that began with his nightly recounting of the adventures of a horse named Red Cloud. By astounding acts of intelligence, loyalty, and courage, Red Cloud saved the skins of a boy and girl amazingly like my brother and me. These bedtime stories graduated into entertaining tales around the dinner table as my father shared dramatic accounts and amusing anecdotes drawn from his childhood in Cortez, Colorado, and also from his varied experiences as a general practitioner in Oklahoma City.
My mother, Vera, was less forthcoming with her stories. One of seven children born to a self-educated dirt farmer who was consulted by his neighbors on difficult mathematical computations and matters of common law, my mother taught herself to read when she was three. She graduated valedictorian of her high school class at the age of sixteen and had to wait tables for two years until she was old enough to enter nursing school—the highest respectable aspiration then available to farm girls from Sparks, Oklahoma.
Vera Alice Pritchett was a free-thinker. She dressed in her big brothers’ clothes and answered only to the name Jimmy. Raised a Southern Baptist, she smoked and drank and played cards. She loathed bigotry of any kind and determined early to speak standard English instead of the thick Oklahoma twang indigenous to those parts. Her success with mainstream dialect was passed on to her children, who can put an Okie accent on and off at will, as a kind of parlor game. However, for our mother, as for Eliza Doolittle, [proper] language was a ticket up and out. To her dying day, Vera had an abiding curiosity about words and their meanings. She never hesitated to look something up in the dictionary or encyclopedia and was a stickler about good grammar and usage. She could and should have been the English teacher I became.
But, for many still largely secret and unfathomed reasons, my mother suffered in later life from a crippling insecurity and introversion. Perhaps it was that she never received the education her intellect deserved. I don’t know. What I do remember most acutely is her great love of words coupled with an almost pathological shyness to articulate her own personal feelings. Under this mixed influence, I grew up sensitized both to the richness of the language and to a charged domestic atmosphere of thoughts unspoken.
Thus, very early in my life, I learned that finding the right word to name what was hidden or unexpressed became a key to emotional deliverance (and a powerful taboo to break). I am convinced, now, that much of my drive toward written expression arose from an essential need to bring my interior consciousness into congruence with professed reality. Ordered language in all its richness and subtlety became the medium for testing and validating secret perceptions, for making accountable the twanging vibrations of my deepest intuition. To this day, I experience right words set in the right order—the careful, written naming of the actual—as having a kind of magnetic pull toward truth.
A confirmed introvert as a teenager, I spent a lot of time in my room hiding behind closed blinds and talking to my mirror. I did have a powerful and charismatic English teacher, Mrs. Margaret Tuck, in whose classes I burned to excel, but my recollection of those years is that they passed largely underground, in deep unconsciousness. The only poem I remember writing, in the pit of some adolescent romantic despair, was entitled “Run, Lethe, Run.” I still have it somewhere.
As an English major at Smith College, I read a great deal of old poetry and wrote a great many scholarly and analytical papers. A friend at Vassar gave me my first volume of contemporary poetry, a copy of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. Though Plath had actually roomed in the dormitory next door to my own, I would never have discovered her then on my own. I remember reading the collection with only passing interest; it was well beyond my experience. When I submitted “Run, Lethe, Run” to the campus literary magazine, it was turned down cold.
After graduation, I taught prep school English in Boston and wrote parodies of Beowulf, Chaucer, and Shakespeare to entertain my students but without any particular commitment. It wasn’t, in fact, until some years later, when I was a young wife, when I had given up teaching high school and had no clear sense of calling, when I had moved to a small town [in Northern New England] and a dilapidated farm where I was lonely and my husband struggled to make a living [as a family practitioner] and we both struggled to deal with our separate and mutual sadness over my reproductive infertility, that, my back against the wall, words began to flow and poems come. In that extremity, poetry came as a gift, a promise of deliverance to inform and express the difficult facts of my adult existence.
I have been struck over and over by the natural eloquence that even the simplest folks can rise to when their words exactly match the tenor of their feeling. Simple eloquence is something I practice toward. Simple eloquence and that music of meaning leaning toward us out of the magical affinities of words. My narratives, long and short, in roughly iambic free verse, recount tales of quirky, small town lives. Lyrics come when, out of great confusion, some saving clarity falls like a pearl to plumb the deepest well of my psyche. The lyrics offer an architecture for mazy interior states of being and, as such, they act as compass and measure for psychic transformation.
Writing poems has been a journey in process, a discipline in precision which was greatly helped at the outset by a neighborhood gathering of poets who workshopped together, and subsequently by my attending various poetry conferences and earning my MFA in writing poetry from Vermont College. The low residency masters program allowed me to take myself and my writing seriously and to move in the exciting and confirming company of those also keenly committed to writing and fine literature while honoring my obligations at home. Importantly too, I made friendships with other poets with whom I still correspond, share work, critiques, and inspiration.
Time, mistakes, much practice, and maturation have wrought many changes in my work and outlook. I am more eclectic now than I used to be, and more humble, more tolerant of a wide range of expression, but I have never doubted my lived and inherited allegiance to the power of language to say it straight; to deliver our deepest, unspoken realities to light; to communicate feeling and thought so powerfully and accurately from one human being to another that it frees us from hegemonies of ignorance and denial. Words matter to me because I have experienced their power to liberate and transform. Though my daily conversation is most often awkward, shallow, and imprecise, the kind of concentration and penetration true poetry achieves—the convergence of my thought and feeling in an image and rhythm of words—delivers me to my truest self. As Robert Frost says in “Mowing”:
Anything more than the the truth would have
seemed too weak...
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
Long before I was a poet, I celebrated telling moments and the power of language in personal letters. Now, though my primary form of journaling is still my letters, I find I could not live without the more rigorous, and selfless, challenge of poetry. My engagement with the language and the effort to make poetry with it has become my way of being, of discovering and integrating what it is I feel and know and don’t know. It is a discipline that opens out to the world in unexpected ways, leading to deeper and wider wells of understanding and feeling.
Writing narrative poems lets me be an archivist, saving from oblivion the stories of my family and others, binding teller and listener together in a shared reverence for different lives and the mutual enjoyment of words well used. My lyric poems mark those moments when the way I thought the world was suddenly breaks into a larger, more perplexing and ambiguous reality. By articulating the actual and the imagined in a music of sound and form, writing poems teaches me the contours of my own consciousness. It demands my fullest emotional and intellectual honesty and my commitment to language as an organ of truth, an instrument of worldly exploration and personal transformation. Words, like stepping stones across a foggy swamp, lead me toward the new ground of my knowing.
—Pamela Harrison (1993)