While writing my poem in response to Meghan O’Rourke’s Once: Poems, I ended up using her poems “Chemotherapy” and “Elegy: Hill Without Scar” as my main sources of influence. Although the structures of these poems influenced my poem layout, O’Rourke’s technique of using her poem settings, specifically the weather, which I note in my review, and her use of personification inspired the contents of my poem.
When I began the first draft of my poem, "Fireworks that don't go boom," I focused more on establishing the setting of the poem, similar to how O’Rourke does in “Elegy” (30). In this poem, she wrote “the shutters of the house were open./The snow lay on the ground like cold and cracking embers.” I loved how she contrasted the cold of the snow with the idea of cracking embers—a comparison I tried to work into my own poem. I first wrote how the “houses [shivered]/as field mice.” With this line, I was able to work in the cold connotation with shivering, something I emphasized by personifying the house and likening it to mice that might huddle together for warmth.
Once I introduced the coldness in my poem, I had difficult time writing in some form of heat to contrast it. Because I had made the house the focus of the cold, I chose to also make it the focus of heat, similar to how O’Rourke described snow with the heat diction of cracking embers. This also enabled me to further personify the house, since I was able to describe the windows as sweating.
After my description of the setting, I chose to move on with the poem—I had set my scene, now I had to juxtapose the subject of the weather comparison. In O’Rourke’s “Chemotherapy,” she introduces her mother like a news report, “The evening news: Mother’s doing fine today” (16). This technique of introducing her mother like a weather report juxtaposed to the setting description, a decomposing squirrel in this poem, allowed her to compare the two. Like the squirrel, the speaker in O’Rourke’s poem “couldn’t make [herself] not look” (16).
Unlike O’Rourke who used the squirrel as a comparison to her mother, I used the setting to both compare and contrast the state of the speaker’s father. For example, the juxtaposition of the father to the house likens him to the cold and distant nature of it. In the next part of my poem, I focused more on the warmer aspects of the setting. For instance, while I had focused on the grayness of the house at the beginning, now I used more vivid language, such as butterscotch and amber-eyed, which when juxtaposed to sun emphasized golden and lively imagery.
Although this warmth contrasted the father’s coldness and worsening condition, I was able to use the ending imagery to connect back to him. In the last few lines of my poem, I focus on the deaths of the pigeons, whose “hot bodies ruffle,/feathers blooming into dark/clouds that rain down in wet bursts,/too heavy to be wind-scattered.” In these lines, dark clouds suggested a grayness similar to the poem’s beginning. I strengthened this connection through the juxtaposition of the birds’ wetness. O’Rourke also uses this technique of connecting her last description back to the beginning of her poem when she writes “You slept like an ember” (30). By making this connection, O’Rourke and I are able to keep the dying parent present in the mind of the reader without being overt about it. I believe this is what makes setting so useful, especially in poems about death.
One thing I had to be careful about in regards to setting, though, was avoiding the idea of rain at a funeral, which is often overdone. I believe both O’Rourke and I were able to keep our poems sophisticated, though, by focusing on the setting juxtaposed to the other elements of our poems, as opposed to simply using the setting to set the scene.
When I began the first draft of my poem, "Fireworks that don't go boom," I focused more on establishing the setting of the poem, similar to how O’Rourke does in “Elegy” (30). In this poem, she wrote “the shutters of the house were open./The snow lay on the ground like cold and cracking embers.” I loved how she contrasted the cold of the snow with the idea of cracking embers—a comparison I tried to work into my own poem. I first wrote how the “houses [shivered]/as field mice.” With this line, I was able to work in the cold connotation with shivering, something I emphasized by personifying the house and likening it to mice that might huddle together for warmth.
Once I introduced the coldness in my poem, I had difficult time writing in some form of heat to contrast it. Because I had made the house the focus of the cold, I chose to also make it the focus of heat, similar to how O’Rourke described snow with the heat diction of cracking embers. This also enabled me to further personify the house, since I was able to describe the windows as sweating.
After my description of the setting, I chose to move on with the poem—I had set my scene, now I had to juxtapose the subject of the weather comparison. In O’Rourke’s “Chemotherapy,” she introduces her mother like a news report, “The evening news: Mother’s doing fine today” (16). This technique of introducing her mother like a weather report juxtaposed to the setting description, a decomposing squirrel in this poem, allowed her to compare the two. Like the squirrel, the speaker in O’Rourke’s poem “couldn’t make [herself] not look” (16).
Unlike O’Rourke who used the squirrel as a comparison to her mother, I used the setting to both compare and contrast the state of the speaker’s father. For example, the juxtaposition of the father to the house likens him to the cold and distant nature of it. In the next part of my poem, I focused more on the warmer aspects of the setting. For instance, while I had focused on the grayness of the house at the beginning, now I used more vivid language, such as butterscotch and amber-eyed, which when juxtaposed to sun emphasized golden and lively imagery.
Although this warmth contrasted the father’s coldness and worsening condition, I was able to use the ending imagery to connect back to him. In the last few lines of my poem, I focus on the deaths of the pigeons, whose “hot bodies ruffle,/feathers blooming into dark/clouds that rain down in wet bursts,/too heavy to be wind-scattered.” In these lines, dark clouds suggested a grayness similar to the poem’s beginning. I strengthened this connection through the juxtaposition of the birds’ wetness. O’Rourke also uses this technique of connecting her last description back to the beginning of her poem when she writes “You slept like an ember” (30). By making this connection, O’Rourke and I are able to keep the dying parent present in the mind of the reader without being overt about it. I believe this is what makes setting so useful, especially in poems about death.
One thing I had to be careful about in regards to setting, though, was avoiding the idea of rain at a funeral, which is often overdone. I believe both O’Rourke and I were able to keep our poems sophisticated, though, by focusing on the setting juxtaposed to the other elements of our poems, as opposed to simply using the setting to set the scene.